Ten Days … what is going on?

What the hell is going on with the event formerly known as Ten Days on the Island, Hag wishes to know.

In the run-up to the last election the Liberals vowed to halve the funding to this event, recently re-branded, equally vaguely, as plain Ten Days.

The response of management was to lease extravagant new premises in the CBD, unveil a new logo and promise, according to an interview given to a journalist at The Age in Melbourne by Ten Days boss Marcus Barker, “to host a series of cultural events in the 23 months between festivals, aimed at raising funds and, most importantly, keeping it in the public eye and in the minds of philanthropists and sponsors.”

The last festival was in February 2013 and with 2014 already half over, the only evidence of activity has been a Hobart outing for the hoary old Spiegeltent, a commercial enterprise which has been knocking around mainland festivals for more than a decade, and an exhibition exploring “ in large-scale 3D form the versatile yet humble medium of corrugated cardboard.” (pictured above).

Hang on a minute? Isn’t Hobart pretty well-served for commercial art galleries? And isn’t Ten Days supposed to be a performing arts festival?

Walk past 71 Murray Street and see for yourself. But most Hobartians just walk on by.

No visitation figures are available for the cardboard box show just as no report has yet materialised on last year’s festival or the income derived from the Spiegeltent season. The Government would seem to be getting little value from the $2.3 million dollars it invests in this operation – which has been described as the love child of Jim Bacon and Robin Archer.

What has leaked out is that the new Artistic Director, David Malacari, has been relegated to the basement after apparently refusing to work in the office allocated to him, a fraction of the size of Barker’s and with no door. Apparently this relocation of the Artistic Director cost a cool $30,000.

Venues all over town are booked for next year’s new-look Ten Days but no-one is quite sure what is going into them. Malacari has been/is overseas looking for product and 71 Murray St is looking like a lot of empty premises around town, grim and unoccupied. Barker, meanwhile, was last seen at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Every mainland festival is now annual and yet Tasmania persists in maintaining an organizational infrastructure that, given the miniscule scale of the event, cannot possibly keep a permanent staff busy for two whole years. And yet they were advertising last January for a permanent operations manager at $75,000 a year plus super …

• Martyn Goddard: A Festival of Waste, includes downloadable financial analysis

• Margaretta Pos, in Comments: Far worse than the state of Ten Days, is the Government’s decision to call for applications for the post of Director of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery – from within the public service. It appears that the acting director has been given the nod. Surely she should have to compete for the job, along with the best of an outside field? Arts Minister Vanessa Goodwin should be held to account over this appalling decision.