Posts Tagged ‘Future Generation Art Prize’

This week marked an emergency situation for LA Opera – they needed a $14 million bailout from the city on Tuesday in order to even stay afloat through the middle of next year.  Stephen Rountree (CEO of both LA Opera and Music Center), as reported by the LA Times said the company is “$20 million in debt,” and since LA Opera is “by far the most important tenant at the Dorothy Chandler, its failure could set off a chain of events that takes down the Music Center.”  Disaster was narrowly averted when the city agreed to loan the money, which will be repaid in one lump sum in January 2013.  It’s not hard to imagine that this debt largely came from LA Opera’s somewhat controversial decision to stage an avante-garde and severely expensive production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – both the individual productions during the last and current seasons as well as the full Ring Cycle Festival, set to include over 100 artists and institutions next summer.  They’ve spent $32 million staging the Ring Cycle.  County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said, rightly, that the LA Opera is a significantly important artistic organization for LA county continuing to say, “For all they have built up… this is almost no price for us to pay… we’ll save the opera.”  [LA Times]

Given how rare it is to hear of money being given to artists in non-emergency situations, you’ll be glad to hear that a new prize awarding $100,000 to artists under 35 has been announced by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.  A Ukrainian billionaire and art collector, Victor Pinchuk will present his Future Generation Art Prize every two years to artists who can apply online and artists that have been nominated by professionals in the art world.  The international jury set to decide the winner is said to include Elton John, Miuccia Prada, and in some small way, the public.  Winners can’t have just made one great piece and then run off with the money, however – the New York Times reports that “$40,000 of the purse must go into the production of art.”  General Director of the Pinchuk Art Center Eckhard Schneider said, “We also wanted to make sure that an older generation of artists helps the younger.” [NY Times]