Category: issues

Another prominent cultural figure has attacked the UK government’s plan to gut arts spending to help fund the 2012 London Olympics. This time, it’s “the chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society – the second-oldest music society in the world, which commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” taking the Blair government to task, accusing it of doing “thoughtless damage” to the arts.

Minnesota’s largest daily paper, the Star Tribune, which was recently acquired by a private equity firm, has announced that it will cut 145 jobs over the coming months, and some reporters within the paper are already being reassigned. It looks as if the paper’s arts coverage will be hit hard: two TV writers are told to compete for a single job, and the only full-time architecture critic in the Twin Cities is being reassigned entirely.

This year’s USC Getty Arts Journalism fellowships have been awarded. This year’s fellows include: Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen; Wall Street Journal’s Brett Campbell; NPR’s Celeste Headlee; La Opinion’s Victoria Infante; SeeingBlack.com’s Esther Iverem; NYT contributor Carol Kino; Chicago Public Radio’s Edward Lifson; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie of the Lebanon-based Daily Star.

Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory may decide which of the city’s arts capital projects will get funding after the City Council couldn’t agree. They sent him two proposals.

It’s been a rough few years for upstate New York’s Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), which has seen attendance drop off at its featured series with the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet. But now comes news that preseason sales for this summer’s classical and dance programming at SPAC are up a whopping 40%!

The British Parliament is going to investigate the business of ticket scalping. “Many music fans complain that ticket touts – who continually snap-up tickets for festivals and gigs before selling them on for inflated prices – are a huge problem.”

Eight months ago, Brooklyn officials unveiled ambitious plans for a new cultural district, including an impressive glass arts library designed by architect Enrique Norton. Now, the project is foundering, and the library may never be built, thanks in large part to a revolving-door leadership at the borough’s library system that failed to generate any funding for the new building.

“The mandarin complaint about the new digital order is that it lacks history and substance, existing in a chaotic eternal present – one with no memory and precious little attention span. But a bibliographical guide that Turkel posted in January demonstrates that there is now extensive enough literature to speak of a field of digital history.”

The arts have had enormous expansion in the past ten years under Tony Blair’s Labour government. But “sceptics maintain that little of enduring value has been created in the arts under Blair. Rather, they suggest, Labour has funded smoke and mirrors from the public purse.”

“US dissatisfaction with intellectual property protection typically bears little relation to whether the country actually meets international standards. While the USTR report and its supporters seek to paint many countries as laggards on copyright, this rhetoric ignores the fact that many of those same countries are compliant with their international obligations.”