Category: issues

“Stung by a recent Calgary Arts Development report on the poverty of arts facilities in one of Canada’s wealthiest cities, Calgary’s city council has unanimously approved a recommendation to budget as much as $150-million on capital programs for arts spaces.”

“The chronically underfunded Canadian Opera Company is one of the big winners in Canada Council for the Arts’ one-time grants totalling $33 million announced this week… Only a few organizations – including the COC, the National Ballet of Canada, the Montreal Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the Vancouver Symphony and the Stratford Festival – got seven-figure grants.”

“A contentious drama pick, an apocalyptic novel by one of the nation’s most reclusive writers and one of the first awards to a jazz musician were among the arts Pulitzers announced Monday. … To skeptics, the Pulitzers have a long history of stodgy arts choices, especially in music.”

The Barbican chief is fed up: “After more than a decade of direct involvement in the arts and the debate about them, there are many things of which I am sick to death. This is not just a spasm of impatience but represents my deep belief that if the attitudes behind the policies I describe did not exist, the arts would be better run, healthier, more effective, more varied and more enjoyable even than they are today. Does arts policymaking, in short, get in the way of creating the arts themselves?”

“Four out of five new housing units built in the United States are single-family houses. This statistic has less to do with the nature of the home-building industry, or the suburban location of new housing, than with buyers’ preferences, that is, What People Want.” But why do people want it?

“Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road,” set in a post-apocalyptic U.S., won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction today, while David Lindsay-Abaire’s ‘Rabbit Hole” was a surprise winner for drama. Ornette Coleman, 77, won the music Pulitzer for ‘Sound Grammar,’ a live recording of eight original songs performed in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in 2005.”

Prominent Canadian artists go to Parliament to argue for increased support. “The event, spearheaded by the Writers’ Union of Canada, was designed to encourage the government to pay greater attention to the arts and restore cultural funding, with a particular focus on promoting Canadian artists abroad.”

“Public relations firms are always hungry for new ways of getting their messages to stick, and survey results, served up to a factoid-hungry media, are proving to be an increasingly effective tactic.” Now the web lets anyone run a survey…

“For the blogosphere represents an enormous democratic opportunity. In the past, those 71m bloggers would have had to wait for a publisher to deem their work worthy of distribution. Now everyone has a platform. Those who want to challenge tyrannies, or even corporate misbehaviour, can do so directly. Whether it’s the Baghdad Blogger or the public service workers highlighted in today’s Society section, free expression is now just a click away. But this freedom has a downside.”

“The cutesy wordplay or visual tricks that dominated 70s and 80s advertising have been under attack since the 1990s. While TV sketch comedy seemed to exist almost entirely on catchphrases, commercials like Honda’s Power of Dreams achieved plaudits and boosted sales without relying on jingles or quips. Complex narratives and a filmic approach – ad techniques that were the preserve of fashion brands – have been inching on to the screen, displaying an almost arthouse sensibility.”