Category: issues

Beryl Bainbridge has difficulty getting excited about Liverpool as a “capital” of culture. “It is not to say that I disapprove of Liverpool trying to be cultural, but what the hell is a culture of youth to a city that is in decline?”

“Under current proposals, three-quarters of the council’s 990 clients will get funding increases and 80 organisations will receive cash for the first time. But where there are gains, there are also the inevitable losses. Many companies face closure and hundreds of shocked employees are contemplating redundancy. But what has rankled more than anything has been the way the process has been handled.”

Managers hope that Adrienne Arsht’s $30 million gift to the troubled Miami Performing Arts Center will help put some of those troubles behind. Carnival Cruise Lines, the center’s naming patron has agreed to take its name off the building.

A recent Boston Foundation report on the stte of the arts in Boston “contended that while large institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Museum of Fine Arts remain healthy, smaller groups are losing audience and struggling to balance their budgets. An organization ‘whose vision has either dissipated or lost its resonance with its audience or supporters’ should consider shutting down, the foundation wrote.”

The report calls for funding large companies on ten year cycles and for all publicly-funded organisations to hold a ‘free week’ every year, in which all admission charges were removed.

“Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?”

“The UK government has appointed British Museum director Neil MacGregor ‘Chairman of World Collections’, a new diplomatic post which will promote six national collections internationally and encourage links between these British institutions and the rest of the world, particularly Asia and Africa.”

Miami’s Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, named for Carnival Corp., the cruise-ship operator, will be renamed the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County. Why? Arsht gave the center $30 million.

“It is no accident that the new home of Westminster Academy looks more like an office than a school. Academies – Labour’s big idea in education – are free, independent secondary schools built with public funds (generally about £23m) plus a £2m top-up from a private-sector partner – usually a faith or business group, which, to the ire of academy critics, then gets to set the school’s educational agenda.”

Attendance and revenues were both up in fiscal 2007 at the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul, which reported a surplus of $422,000 on a $17 million budget.