Category: issues

“State officials recently said they were at least $1 billion short of securing the $2.3 billion needed to fund the Moynihan Station plan to remake Pennsylvania Station and move Madison Square Garden to the rear of the neighboring Farley Post Office, which would also house a new train hall.”

Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on Utah’s Great Salt Lake is one of the best-known pieces of public art in America. But “a fierce debate, with equal parts art, environmentalism and economics, has erupted over a plan by the state to allow oil drilling about five miles across the lake.”

Has New York lost its ability to plan and execute large-scale development properly? Three current major projects in Manhattan point up the “overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas [that] should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today.”

A celebrated sculptor from Minnesota who uses sticks, twigs, and other natural materials in his work is taking on an unusual issue, and using his art to raise awareness of it. The issue: buckthorn, a devastatingly destructive plant that destroys entire forests from below.

The five leaders of LA’s largest organizations talk about the emergence of Los Angeles as a cultural leader. “L.A. has emerged very recently as one of the major centers of art production — and it’s on the rise.”

“When an aggressive federal prosecutor realized that the bacteria in the Kurtz home was harmless, the Arabic flier an invitation to an art opening and the tinfoil simply improvised blackout shades, he didn’t write Kurtz a letter of condolence and apology. Rather he sought to indict him on charges of mail and wire fraud, a case that still grinds on today.”

“The more this goes on, the more the bureaucrats convince themselves that Wellington is this cultural capital when, in fact, it is propped up by a disproportionate amount of public money going there.”

The number of university-age students is expected to plummet over the next 10 years, “leaving 70,000 university places unfilled – the equivalent of nearly six universities.Universities will have to compete harder, target more mature students and those from outside the EU to fill seats in lecture halls as a historic dip in the birth rate translates into fewer student numbers.”

“The Shell Guides, beginning in the early 1930s (contemporary with the development of Cockfosters itself), marked the replacement of this particular Metroland of fixed stations and daily commutes with another kind of relationship to travel and the landscape: one based upon the supposed freedom of the car, enabling the exploration of Britain’s strange outposts. Yet at the same time the Shell Guides were part of an attempt to establish a distinctively British modernism.”

“It was 1993 when L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first black elected governor and the grandson of slaves, proposed a museum that would tell their story. Years later, the museum’s future has become clouded by shifting opening dates and stalled fundraising.”