Category: issues

Salman “Rushdie’s new honor raises the same question now that his work raised when Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwah against him in 1989. Do we choose to live in a world that honors writers or in a world that kills them?”

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts advocates for his vision of the arts across America. “Condemning artists for becoming ‘wonderfully expert in talking to one another’ but not to the wider world — and the media for turning American culture into ‘one vast infomercial’ — Gioia told his audience ‘almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment’.”

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has called for the firing of the government minister who started the ongoing row over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. Bhutto, who is in exile, “said Mohammad Ejaz ul-Haq had damaged Islam and Pakistan with his remarks in the Pakistan parliament.”

With Muslim extremists demanding blood in exchange for Salman Rushdie’s pending knighthood, Tim Rutten wonders why there have been so few voices in the West defending Rushdie? “What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.”

An ongoing battle between Peru and Yale University over a collection of Incan artifacts from Machu Picchu is being seen as a new twist on a growing debate over ownership of antiquities. “It does not revolve around criminal allegations of surreptitious tomb-raiding and black-market antiquities deals. But if the circumstances are unique, the background sentiments are not.”

“The Pakistani religious affairs minister who sparked uproar with his criticism of the author Salman Rushdie’s knighthood today announced he was planning a visit to Britain” in an effort to clear the air. In a statement to the Pakistani parliament, the minister appeared to condone the idea of killing Mr. Rushdie with a bomb, sparking numerous threats on the author’s life.

The Tower of London is being considered for a spot on UNESCO’s list of endangered world heritage sites because of the skyscrapers rising all around it. “hemmed in by a noisy highway and overrun by tourists, the landmark no longer casts quite the same shadow in an area dominated by brightly lit, glass-canopied office buildings and hypermodern skyscrapers like the Norman Foster building known as The Gherkin.”

Ticket prices for the arts in Pittsburgh, where a central ticketing company represents more than 40 local groups, are going up, thanks to new fees being attached to base prices. “The fees are still smaller than many handling fees charged for big-budget concerts and cultural events, from Ticketmaster down to charges by the major Cultural District theaters.”

As Tony Blair prepares to step down as UK Prime Minister, his legacy is dominated by one word: Iraq. But history may judge him by another standard: his support for the arts. “During his decade in office Britain has shaken off its creative lethargy and emerged as the liveliest cultural territory in the West. And even if Mr. Blair himself is not much loved in artistic circles, this metamorphosis has taken place under his watch. So does he deserve credit?”

The UK’s governing cabinet, stunned by Muslim fury over plans to knight author Salman Rushdie, is reportedly split down the middle and at a loss as to how to deal with what is rapidly becoming a minor global flashpoint in the continuing culture war between Islamic countries and the west. “The mounting scale of the international protests, evoking memories of the 1989 fatwa against the author, fractured the Government’s united front on the issue last night.”