Blog

Check-up: Cuno’s First Year Running The Chicago Art Institute

James Cuno has made an impact in his first year running the Chicago Art Institute. “He has been at the institute just over a year, which once was thought too little time for any head of a major art museum to make felt his or her presence. But recent thinking in the profession has tended toward making changes rapidly during the first year, while a director enjoys the strongest trustee support, and that’s the way a number of former institute curators proceeded in directorships elsewhere, with mixed results.”

Music Returns Slowly To N’Orleans

Musicians are slowly returning to New Orleans. “Yet the birthplace of jazz remains a shadow of its once vibrant self — where music poured from block after block of the French Quarter and beyond late into the night. Since Hurricane Katrina, the crowds are smaller, the streets darker, the venues limited and pay for musicians often minimal.”

The New Collectors

The art market is booming, by all accounts. But who are these people that are putting their money into art? “What kind of people are they, the buyers of contemporary art, so different from the recipients of creativity in other fields – neither like the publisher nor the reader of a book, neither like the producer nor the audience of a film, neither like the record company nor the listener to a song?”

What Happened To Great Magazine Covers?

“It is one of the great signposts of the modern world, the wall of magazines to be found in every newsagent, in every railway station, and in every library in Britain, but in recent years these displays have become torture racks, revealing everything that is mean and cynical about how we live. It’s hard to believe those covers were once the repository of things gracious, beautiful and imaginative.”

Women Pull Ahead In College

There are more women than men in US colleges, and they’re scoring better too. “There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s. The trends have developed in plain view — not ignored exactly, but typically accompanied by some version of the question: Isn’t this a sign of women’s progress?”

Chicago Architecture Tries To Keep Up With A Glorious Past

Chicago has a distinguished history of great architecture. The city’s contemporary architecure has difficulty competing, so a set of annual awards teases out some of the best. “Do the awards reflect great originality, or even the presence of geniuses among us? Maybe not, but they’re limited by the fact that they honor projects that have been executed; if you’re an architect and your last name isn’t Gehry, many of your best and most original designs are likely to remain unbuilt. And sure, the awards paint a collective portrait of architects who are primarily extending, refining and reinterpreting the tropes of modernism, rather than founding new movements or styles. But they’re doing so with a confident panache that virtually swaggers.”

Republicans Propose Killing Funding For Public Broadcasting

“As the White House scrambles to find ways to pay for an expensive war in Iraq and the rebuilding of New Orleans, public broadcasting is once again being offered up as an expense the American public can possibly do without. PBS television and radio receives $400 million US annually in federal support. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative group within the caucus, recommended on Wednesday that it all be cut.”