Category: issues

“The leader of the National Endowment for the Arts decried culture as bankrupt and called for the elevation of artists and intellectuals in society at Stanford University’s commencement address on Sunday.” Gioia told the students that “we live in a culture that barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts and artists,” and challenged them to overcome the national obsession with pop culture and celebrity.

“We should have people working full time covering all of the theaters they can seven nights a week. There are tons of art galleries that most people have never heard of. Musical groups are everywhere. We need the critics. Their opinions are one thing, but the fact that they can go into these small places, consider these artists and watch these performances says that the arts are a serious part of this community.”

“Sheila P. Burke offered her resignation as deputy secretary and chief operating officer, after working for the Smithsonian for seven years while earning more than $1.2 million in six years for outside duties, a Washington Post review showed. … Burke’s resignation came on the eve of an independent report that sources said would criticize her extensive outside activities, including highly compensated corporate board seats, academic appointments, a federal commission that oversees Medicare, and numerous nonprofit organizations.”

“For six decades the Bard family has managed the Hotel Chelsea, overseeing a bohemian enclave that has been a long-term home for writers, artists and musicians including Mark Twain, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Andy Warhol, and Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. The Bard era came to an end yesterday” with the hotel board installing new management, and “the Bards were busy filling boxes in the lobby with help from residents who expressed concern about what the management change portends for one of New York’s more quirky cultural institutions.”

“In England, the tradition of going up to London to see a show has been entrenched for 500 years. The result is arts monsters, all of them in London, such as the Royal Opera, English National Opera and the National Theatre. They have all got too big to function properly; the right paw can only communicate with the left paw through hordes of intermediaries who inhabit the body of the monster like nits, hiding in the folds of dead skin. A better question would be whether such dropsical organisations are truly viable. Their capacity for absorbing funds is legendary, but year on year the monsters give birth to mice.”

“The ideas behind the steampunk sci-fi subgenre have been around since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but it was given its moniker in the late ’80s as a speculative-fiction genre, alongside cyberpunk, ribofunk and splatterpunk. While the others peer 15 minutes into the future, steampunk envisions a future that has collapsed onto a re-imagined Victorian past.”

The Smithsonian’s governance committee, created in March, has released 25 recommendations to clarify the role of its 17-member Board of Regents, ensure that information reaches the board in Washington and strengthen what the committee called a ‘culture of accountability’.”

“Americans sent 18.7 billion text messages in December 2006, nearly double the 9.7 billion that were sent the previous December, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group. While various companies have tried to beat a path from consumers’ phones to their wallets, theater promoters, weary of phones ringing infuriatingly during denouements, have held back. Until now.”

So newspapers are shedding their classical music critics. Why is this a surprise, wonders Greg Sandow. “In an age when new arts groups compete for coverage and popular culture keeps getting smarter — why should they expect any press coverage at all?”