Arts Visionary Demarco Faces Ruin As Council Calls in Bailiffs for (Pounds) 50,000 Debt; After a Lifetime Committed to the Arts, the 'Soul of the Festival' Could See His Priceless Archive Broken Up ... Because of an Unpaid Rent Bill

Sunday Herald › March 29, 2004

Linked as:

Summary

The poet and visionary William Blake once lamented that "where there is money there is no art". It's a point that Ricky Demarco must bitterly agree with this weekend.

Demarco - the artist, curator, innovator and impresario whose name is synonymous with the Edinburgh Festival - is entangled in a financial row with Edinburgh City Council which he claims "could break me personally and break-up my archive".

See the full content of this document

Extract

Arts Visionary Demarco Faces Ruin As Council Calls in Bailiffs for (Pounds) 50,000 Debt; After a Lifetime Committed to the Arts, the 'Soul of the Festival' Could See His Priceless Archive Broken Up ... Because of an Unpaid Rent Bill

Demarco, 73, has spent around half a century collecting over one million images of life around the festival and has created an archive variously described by experts as "priceless" and "unique".

But for the last six years he has been squashing the hundreds of boxes of photographs and paintings into a small annex space at New Parliament House, which he believed was a temporary hom...

See the full content of this document