“Faced with the pending inauguration, Greg Allen said in his statement, ‘I could no longer stand by and let my most effective artistic vehicle be anything but a machine to fight Fascism.’ His new company ‘will be comprised entirely of people of color, LBTQ+, artist/activist women, and other disenfranchised voices in order to combat the tyranny of censorship and oppression.’ That explanation was received with ire and disbelief by Neo-Futurist company members, current and past, who say the troupe is now more diverse than it’s ever been, and the breakup is not political but personal—rooted in a long-suppressed history of problems between Allen and the theoretically democratic ensemble that he formed.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Claim: Musicals Are Squeezing Plays Out Of London’s West End
In an interview with The Stage, Wilson was asked if the West End needed a greater variety of theatre sizes. He responded: “Yes we do. And the reason is that the big theatres, progressively the smaller big theatres, are being used for musicals more. Gypsy going in to the Savoy, and Funny Girl… the 800 and 900-seat theatres are being used for musicals, and drama will be squeezed out.”
Is The Immediacy Of Music At Odds With Its Enduring Qualities?
“Is music meant to be ephemeral or enduring? And indeed, are those two goals consonant with one another, or at odds? For those who take as their mentors, our sources of inspiration, and our measures of quality long-dead Germans like Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, perhaps the ultimate goal would be to write, like they did, something of value that transcends our era. But can one write a piece with the goal that it become ‘an important part of the repertoire’?”
A Fuller Picture Of The Toronto Symphony’s Money Problems
“In the two years of Jeff Melanson’s tenure, total expenses at the orchestra increased by almost a third, administration costs by 80 per cent. In previous years, the TSO’s expenses had either stayed flat or declined. The TSO did not see an accompanying increase in revenues in the last fiscal year. Ticket sales declined slightly in fiscal 2015-16, as did government support. Thus the organization’s surplus was created, in the first instance, by having the Toronto Symphony Foundation, the organization’s long-term funding support, make a contribution to the orchestra of almost $5-million in fiscal 2015-16, more than double its usual contribution.”
After Ten Years Toronto’s Luminato Festival Starts To Evolve To A New Business Model
“Under the new business model, Luminato would start planning events three years in advance so that it could work with other festivals as partners in commissioning shows and work out the best possible deals with venues and artists. Meanwhile the festival would rely less on government funding.”
Corporate Arts Partnerships That Aren’t Just About Money
It’s not unusual for corporate entities to give money to arts organizations. It’s far less common for them to actually break out the hammers and nails. “We could just donate to the arts,” Joseph A. McMillan Jr., who founded DDG, said by phone. “But as a real estate company, we have opportunities and capabilities others might not possess.”
Is It Our Inconsistencies And Contradictions That Inspire Our Creativity?
“Perhaps contradictions are a necessary ingredient for triggering intellectual creativity. While most humans struggle to maintain a sense of psychological unity, contradictions produce destabilising breaches in the self. Whether conscious or unconscious, these fissures nourish creative inspiration, which can be interpreted as a way to resolve or sublimate internal oppositions. I believe this can be said of all domains of creation. Perhaps art, literature, science or philosophy wouldn’t be possible without intrapersonal contradictions and the desire to resolve them.”
So What Would A Positive Federal Arts Policy Look Like In The Trump Era?
Economist Tyler Cowen has some suggestions for how he thinks national arts policy in the United States could improve under a Trump Republican Congress. A futile hope? Here were Cowen’s criteria:
First, they must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, they should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, they should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the U.S., and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes.
You’ve got to admire the effort to find the positive. Others have argued the arts could be a natural target since artists aren’t exactly in the sweet spot of Trump’s constituency. Federal arts funding has never recovered since the culture wars of the 1990s and it’s highly unlikely that the Republican Congress will increase that funding, no matter how small it is. But at a policy level, Cowen does have some interesting suggestions, basically proposing restoring restrictions put on the NEA at the time the budget was cut. He suggests restoring the NEA’s ability to fund individual artists, a punitive action meant to restrict funding controversial art. And he suggests killing the requirement that the NEA send 40 percent of its budget to state arts agencies so they can “regrant” it. This, he reasons, would give the feds more control of the money.
Restoring individual grants would be hugely popular in the arts community. But it’s difficult to tell if there would be support for removing the 40 percent state allocation. On the one hand, it would give the NEA more bang for its bucks, and the NEA is much more sophisticated in its operations than many state arts agencies. On the other hand, with so much emphasis in recent years on artists being more responsive to their communities, one could make the case that local agencies have a better sense of what their communities need.
ArtsJournal blogger Michael Rushton argues that:
“Whether you agree with his advice or not, he does raise an important issue: arts policy in the US at the federal and state level lack clear goals, and as such rigorous evaluation of the success, or failure, of their policies is near impossible. That in turn explains why the academic literature on arts policy in the US is so uncritical. What is there to criticize? What is the NEA, and in turn the state arts councils it helps to fund, trying to achieve? Without knowing that, it is not possible to evaluate whether transferring such a high percentage of federal arts funding to the states is actually a good use of funds.”
We may be at the beginning of a critical debate about what constitutes essential infrastructure in this country – what are the things that are public goods but aren’t viable as private capitalist enterprises. Trump says he’ll spend a trillion dollars on public infrastructure, but there are signs his idea is not so much to finance construction and modernization but to privatize and create tax incentives. Are the arts a public good? If even our bridges and roads are about to be privatized to pay for their rebuilding, it’s difficult to imagine the case Trump and the Republicans would make that they are.
Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Ways We Analyze Books
“While critics and book reviewers may continue to be an essential part of public cultural life, literary theorists who do not embrace AI will be at risk of becoming an exotic species – like the librarians who once used index cards to search for information.”
Listening To Artists, National Arts Strategies Pulls Out Of Cleveland Area Arts Fellows Program
“Artists objected to the fact that the NAS Creative Community Fellows program would have emphasized community engagement–which they view as the province of outreach programs administered by nonprofit organizations. It also placed substantial emphasis on training for more community engagement–an investment of time and energy many artists view as taking them away from the focus of their work. They note that the work itself is exhibited in galleries and featured in art walks and as such has made enormous contributions to Cleveland neighborhoods.”