Category: issues

The United States issues a list of 12 countries that don’t pursue piracy as aggressively as the US wants them to. “The Bush administration placed the 12 on a ‘priority watch list’ which will subject them to extra scrutiny. The Office of the US Trade Representative said piracy is costing the country billions of dollars.”

“Although much has been written about the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul mentality of the raid on lottery arts funding, far less in the way of column inches have been spent on the recent cut of £5.3 million to the largest funding body for arts research in the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The cuts were made by the DTI to cover the department’s costs involved in the Rover car company collapse and British Energy’s nuclear liabilities. Why does this cut matter so much? First, it is part of a general attack on research for research’s sake.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not only losing its books editor, but also film critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie to a buyout. “Not only is the paper poised to lose a Who’s Who of senior talent, but about half the remaining staff have been bounced from their current positions and forced to compete for newly created jobs or vacancies.”

“The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently decided to impose a moratorium on acquiring antiquities that left their probable country of modern discovery after 1970, unless we can obtain documents establishing that they were exported legally,” writes Maxwell Anderson, the IMA’s director, who hopes others will follow suit. “A universal moratorium would seriously impact the clandestine trade in antiquities, which fuels the destruction of ancient sites.”

“The culture of New Orleans — the thoroughly local music, food and rituals that are connected to African processions, European carnivals, Caribbean rhythms and America’s history of slavery and intermingling — is a draw not just for tourists, but for New Orleanians. Through sheer perseverance, it is being rebuilt.” Over the weekend, the “38th annual Jazzfest was its old celebratory self, with an undercurrent of determination.”

The current battle over who gets public money – the arts or sport – runs a lot deeper than the runup to the 2012 Olympics. It reflects a much wider split in our culture, a culture in which we can’t imagine the poet competing in an international javelin event, or the gold medal breast stroke champion composing an opera.

It wasn’t always so.

A researcher delves into the censorship archives in Canada’s westernmost province. “Based on his archive research, Mr. Fox says it appears B.C.’s chief censors enthusiastically flexed their muscles and the censoring of films and newsreels was done with a machete rather than a scalpel.”

The Lincoln Center theatre is the first major piece of a restoration of the center. The Alice Tully makeover is “perhaps the largest piece of a project that many doubted would ever come to pass, partly because of the steep price. Yet today Lincoln Center officials are to announce that they have raised $482 million of its estimated $702 million share of the overall project.”

The European Union is issuing a directive that will prohibit theatre producers from printing misleading quotes to hype their shows. “The legislation, which will come into force in December, will make it illegal to extract a positive word or phrase from a theatre review if that paints a misleading picture of the article as a whole. Lawyers are already warning that producers will have to be more careful in the future when using selective quotes in publicity material.”

When it comes to arts funding in Colorado, not all cities are created equal. Denver has its act together with some stable funding and a way to invest in the arts. Colorado Springs, on the other hand, is a city of 500,000+ but doesn’t have nearly the ability to support culture.