Category: issues

Toronto has been undergoing a healthy cultural building boom recently, but some observers have begun wondering whether the city has “the kind of exhibits, holdings and performances that will really live up to our world-class aspirations.”

A huge archive documenting Austria’s involvement in the Holocaust has gone on display at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. “The Vienna cache makes up one of the largest Holocaust archives of any Jewish community, some two million pages. With it historians will be better able to understand how the Holocaust unfolded and provide a window into the daily life of Vienna’s Jews.”

The Star-Tribune is cutting its staff positions for an architecture critic and a classical music critic. The music cut is especially puzzling. “It’s a music center. It’s a capital of American music, and for the people running this newspaper not to get that and not to see it’s really important, even if they don’t understand it, is beyond my ken. What are they thinking about? They want this still to be considered an important newspaper, and they don’t really understand this part of the community.”

“The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter will open at the Universal Orlando Resort, in Florida, in 2009.Touted as a ‘theme park within a theme park’, it will feature attractions and rides based on Harry Potter locations.

The mayor of Pittsburgh has pledged to eliminate an unusual “amusement tax” on area arts groups next year. Many cities levy a tax on tickets to for-profit entertainments like sports and pop concerts, but extending such a tax to non-profit cultural groups is highly unusual. The elimination of the tax will save the city’s performing arts groups nearly half a million dollars per year.

Next week London’s Royal Festival Hall reopens after a £111 million overhaul. “Don’t come here expecting the RFH to have been transformed into some whizzy, hippity-hoppity “iconic” architectural experience for the readily bored. No. The building has been brought back to life in a way wholly recognisable to those who first came to listen to concerts here when Clement Attlee was prime minister and ration books were still in belt-tightening force. Equally, the RFH looks wonderfully fresh and new.”

Impressario Garth Drabinsky has a new project – a talent show for TV called “Triple Sensation – aimed at performers aged 16 to 26 – will run on CBC this fall for three nights in the coveted 8-to-10 Sunday-evening time slot. The winner will take home a $150,000 Indigo-Chapters Books-sponsored scholarship that can be used for any theatrical training institution in the world (pending acceptance). A condition of this interview was no questions about Drabinsky’s impending trial or the fact he has been a fugitive from U.S. justice since failing to appear in New York Federal Court in 1999 on the fraud charges related to the 1998 collapse of Livent.”

The paper recently axed much of its arts staff. “Will there be a reduction in the number of reviews? That’s not the goal. We’re seeking to increase coverage overall, in local arts news, features and criticism. We know this is difficult for some who see criticism as the most significant role for a newspaper in covering arts. But we believe that we would not be fulfilling our obligation to fully inform a broad readership of the importance of arts if we sliced our coverage that narrowly. So we’re going to continue the trend we started several years ago of trying to satisfy those who want strictly criticism as well as those who want more stories about artists, arts institutions and the impact of both of those on our society.”

Is it time for the two Spoleto Festivals to reunite? “The festivals previously worked together on productions, but that ended 14 years ago in 1993 when Menotti left the American festival in a dispute over money and his successor.”

“The image of scholars searching for allegorical meaning in mainstream movies or popular paperbacks might seem farfetched, but as God scholars point out, holier-than-thou attitudes in religious departments have taken a democratic twist over the past couple of decades. They now focus less on what the masses are thinking — the philosophy or theoretical approach — and concentrate more on what they are actually doing: the sociology of their religion.”