Why are there so few African-Americans at Pittsburgh’s high-culture events? Audiences for the symphony and for theatre are mostly white, as they are in most American cities. One reason? “You’re comparing a population that has half as much income as another group, and it’s not surprising that you’d see this showing up in [the spending of] discretionary income,”
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Concert-Hall-As-Billboard
This week Dallas’ Meyerson Hall – home to the Dallas Symphony – is going to be transformed into a giant billboard. The IM Pei-designed building will be bathed in projected-light advertisements for a car-maker and publisher. “The projections will emblazon the symphony hall’s north walls facing Woodall Rodgers Freeway with intricate, abstract designs reminiscent of computers, in a tribute to Bill Joy, Internet wizard, Sun Microsystems co-founder and another of the Audi 8.”
Museum Finds Drawings In Its Attic
The Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Osler has hundreds more Emanuel Vigelands than it thought it had. This week electricians who ventured into the museum’s attic for some repair work discovered several hundred sketches signed by Vigeland. The museum has no idea how they got there.
Six Shows Closing On Broadway
Broadway saw its usual post-Tony box office bounce last week. But the awards also signalled the closing of six shows this month as producers realized they were on the downside and not likely to survive.
Dance Lives In Aspen Santa Fe
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, founded in 1996, is the real thing, writes Anna Kisselgoff. “The company has 12 engaging and very good dancers, two ambitious and smart directors who come out of the Joffrey Ballet organization, and the obvious enthusiasm of wealthy board members in Colorado and New Mexico.”
South Bank Blues
“Artists shudder when they mention South Bank’s Royal Festival Hall; there is no concert hall like it in the rest of the civilised world.” Indeed, London’s South Bank has been a major cultural failure that has bedeviled generations of administrators. What’s the problem? “The arts centre is a 1950s conceit, based on new-town shopping malls where one stop covers all needs. It does not fit the specialised tastes of the 21st century.”
Does UK Arts Policy Value The Right Things?
“There are many in the arts world who believe that the government’s obsession with education and diversity has actually obscured what artists aim to do – produce wonderful work. But are “access” and “excellence” mutually exclusive? Are there too many strings attached to arts funding? Has the government been too utilitarian in its view of the arts, valuing its economic and social by-products, from tourism promotion to crime reduction, over its intrinsic worth?” England’s arts ministers take on the questions.
Fan Fiction – Is It Stealing?
“In the past few years, a curious literary genre known as ‘fan fiction’ has been flourishing. The term refers to all manner of vignettes, short stories and novels based on the universes described in popular books, TV shows and movies. Similarly derived works are appearing in music, where fans are using their computers to mix songs from popular artists into new works that they call ‘mashups.’ Movie fans are taking digital copies of films such as the ‘Star Wars’ epics and creating alternate endings or deleting characters such as the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks. The explosion of these part-original, part-borrowed works has set authors of fan fiction against some media companies in a battle to redefine the line between consumers’ right to ‘fair use’ and copyright holders’ rights to control their intellectual property.”
Destruction of An Historic Culture
Iraq was once a center for art and culture. But it has been in “steep decline for twenty years. The loss into exile of three million people, among them many of the country’s most gifted, has arguably been far more destructive than recent wartime damage. The reduction of the entire middle class to deep poverty, one result of the international sanctions imposed since 1990, compounded the misery. The sanctions — or, as Iraqis say, the siege—had the further effect of sealing them off from advances elsewhere in the world, and even from the hope of catching up. In the past decade a kind of rottenness set in. When I saw Baghdad in 1990, with its neat, palm-lined boulevards, it looked not unlike Kuwait or Riyadh. A decade later the city looked more like Khartoum or Kinshasa, a place of brownouts, grasping bureaucrats, and leaky drains, its broken streets packed with the aimless unemployed.”
When Benefactors Default (What Should Happen?)
Recently the Metropolitan Opera took the unusual step of prying off a donor’s name from its building when the promised gift failed to arrive. So “what can be done when donors can’t meet commitments? Nonprofits can bring lawsuits to force donors to pay up, but seldom do so. Lawsuits are unproductive if the donor does not have the funds and usually spell public relations disaster for both parties. The public, off-with-his-head (or in Vilar’s case, off-with-his-name-plaque) approach may be the last, necessary resort in some cases, but it’s not likely to win future support from the donor if his fortunes recover. It also may have a chilling effect on prospective donors.