National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia presented the Bush administration’s request for a 15 percent budget increase to Congress. “The need for national arts leadership has never been more critical. There is presently a national crisis in state, local, and private arts funding across the United States. Budget cutbacks are nearly universal, and the majority of institutions in most arts fields are currently operating at a deficit with numerous bankruptcies, even among established organizations. Our appropriations — 40% of which are directly allocated to state arts agencies and regional organizations — provide much needed stability in this challenging environment.”
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Diversify This!
Cultural diversity in the UK is mainstream policy for arts organizations. “The pursuit of aesthetic or historical understanding, of attempting to distinguish good paintings from bad or correct interpretations from false ones, is deemed impossible. Instead, all cultural institutions can do is to revel in ‘diversity’, by promoting different kinds of art and competing judgements. Today’s cultural policy rejects the ways of the traditional cultural elite, and presents itself as far more enlightened. However, if we examine the legacy that cultural diversity policy has rejected, we find that some valuable principles have been lost by the wayside.”
Sorting Out The “Multi” In Multi-Culti
The latest attacks on multiculturalism in Britain have been coming from the left. “An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties. Clearly, the official promotion of multicultural policy has not provided any solution to this disorientation – indeed, by actively encouraging expressions of difference and divisions between communities, it may well have fuelled the process of fragmentation.”
Picasso To Go
“In Germany, you don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars to live with an original Andy Warhol. As you would a book from the library, you can check out original art from one of 140 publicly funded “art libraries,” or artotheken. Born in the 1960s to increase Germans’ contact with art, “art libraries” are now an established tool of municipal cultural policy, and one which, for many, act as a door opener.”
Surprise: “Passion” Breaking Box Office Records In Middle East
“Mel Gibson’s controversial movie “The Passion of the Christ,” is breaking box office records across the Middle East. With the approach of Easter, Arab Christians identify primarily with the religious message. But it’s the film’s popularity among Muslims – even though it flouts Islamic taboos – that’s turning it into a phenomenon.”
Bruni Gets NYT Restaurant Critic Job
Frank Bruni has been named the New York Times new restaurant critic. “Mr. Bruni, 39, joined The Times in 1995 as a reporter for The Metro Section before becoming a national correspondent, first in San Francisco and then in Washington. He covered the presidential campaign of George W. Bush and the first eight months of the Bush administration, and went to the Rome bureau in 2002.”
Mamet: The Lowly, Slimy Producer
David Mamet doesn’t have a high opinion of producers: “They watch while the lowly make bricks and suggest, at regular intervals, that the brick-makers begin to gather their own straw. And they propound heresy. They sell all parts of the pig but the squeal. And then they sell the squeal.”
Crying About The NYT’s Interim Restaurant Critics
The position of restaurant critic, is one fraught with danger. Since William Grimes left the job at the New York Times, the paper has used interim critics, but the restaurant industry is angry at the results. “Mr. Grimes wasn’t exactly beloved by the city’s restaurant industry—many considered him sensationalist, too transfixed by his fine-tuned prose to appreciate or even understand the joys of the table—but now his controversial tenure seems like the good old days.”
The DVD Player That Skips The Naughty Parts
Afraid of having your sensibilities offended by something you might see on TV? “Wal-Mart, America’s mightiest retailer, is preparing to ship a $79 DVD player that automatically strips out potentially offensive content.”
London’s Two New Theatres
London is getting two new theatres (in one). “The old Whitehall Theatre near Trafalgar Square will house a 100-seat and a 400-seat space to create the Trafalgar Studios. The theatre first opened in 1930 and is owned by the Ambassador Theatre Group.” The smaller spaces are intended to attract younger audiences, and the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Young Vic have signed up to produce there.