Category: issues

The parallels between ancient Rome and the new American empire are great, posits Cullen Murphy. “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has stood alone as the world’s dominant power. So, for centuries, did Rome. Much has been made of the comparison, both by those who have urged America to seize its imperial destiny and by others who fear the consequences of doing so.”

The Hartford institution is under a cloud of questions about its financial state after its third director in the past ten years departed. A Connecticut newspaper has tried to check out the rumors. But “despite repeated requests from the Journal Inquirer over the last month, a spokeswoman for the private not-for-profit corporation, Linda Richardson, said Tuesday that neither she nor any member of the museum’s 31-person board of trustees would respond to some patrons’ concerns that the museum appears to be in dire straits.”

A collection of 3,600 posters assembled by a Viennese businessman could become the focus of “one of the largest spoliation claims in Western Europe in over 50 years, in terms of the number of objects the museum could lose.” Vienna’s Albertina museum may have obtained the collection, which includes works by Mucha and Klimt, through a “forced sale” by the collector’s nephew as he fled the Nazis.

“Book exports to the United States slid 23.6 per cent between 2002 and 2006, Statistics Canada said yesterday, as the greenback tumbled 26 per cent against the loonie. … Exports of newspapers and other printed material fell in 2006 from a year earlier, and so did films, videos, sound recordings, original art, advertising, architecture and photography.”

A seriously ailing Normando Hernandez Gonzalez, 37, has been held since April 2003 in a maximum-security Cuban prison, serving a 25-year sentence for writing articles critical of the state. “In April, PEN announced that Hernandez Gonzalez would receive its 21st annual PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. The $10,000 award honors ‘international literary figures who have been persecuted or imprisoned for exercising or defending the right to freedom of expression.'”

Miami-Dade has approved a $4.1 bailout of the Carnival performing Arts Center. The newly-opened building has been running a large deficit. “Occupancy cost projections were based on a building area of 476,000 square feet. The Carnival Center’s actual building area is 525,000 square feet. The result of the combined miscalculations was that staff budgeted occupancy costs at $306,250 per month. The costs have come in at $647,844 a month.”

“Though lumped together by Government in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, art and sport make very uneasy bedfellows. Maybe politicians think of them both as the leisure industries for people who didn’t want a proper job. But sport operates on the whole in a strictly controlled artificial arena with clear rules, and performance can usually be judged by empirical means, whereas in the arts we are encouraged to break the rules, intuition is the referee and no infrared beam will measure its worth, though I think some politicians wish it could be so.”

“The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us.”

“Salman Rushdie, whose British knighthood has led to worldwide protests from Muslims angered by his 1989 novel, The Satanic Verses, is not commenting on the uproar, for now. Rushdie responded Monday to an Associated Press query that asked if he had been urged by British authorities not to say anything because of security concerns or whether he had considered not accepting the honor. ‘The British authorities have not asked me to do or not do anything,’ Rushdie wrote in an e-mail.”

“This week, Congress will once again consider what to do about the perceived threat to children from television violence,” Laurence H. Tribe writes. “Even the staunchest critics of TV violence must concede that only certain depictions cause real concern. But letting government decide which depictions threaten children’s welfare (and therefore should be labeled or otherwise restricted or segregated) is both unconstitutional and unwise.”