Category: issues

“Two weeks ago, standing in front of a Tate Modern art icon, Tony Blair is grandstanding for an audience of cultural grandees, boosting the government’s funding record on the arts. Ere the champagne had time to warm or the canapes to curl, some government barbarian manages to dribble out the dire news that there will be a cut, effective April 1st. No press release, no consultation, no time for Professor Frayling, chair of the Arts Council England, or Peter Hewitt, its secretary general, to prepare even an emollient word.”

“With a board made up of august but potentially overextended public officials like the vice president of the United States, can the Smithsonian establish sufficiently rigorous day-to-day oversight? Does an organization with a $1 billion annual budget, 19 museums, 9 research centers and the National Zoo ultimately defy the effective leadership of a single executive at the top? Can the Smithsonian incorporate increasingly popular private-sector fund-raising strategies even as it receives 70 percent of its budget from Congress and has a board appointed by the government?”

“Breaking through the £2bn barrier for the first time last year, online advertising now accounts for 11.4% of all ad spending in the UK compared with 10.9% for newspapers. The gap is getting wider, as growth in online advertising – at 41% in 2006 – far outstripped growth in national newspapers – at 0.2% – and TV, which saw advertising revenues drop 4.7%.”

“You’ve got what used to be called a 20-year nostalgia cycle that’s built into pop culture in the 20th century, in which cultural products get recycled 20 years down the line for secondary consumption. That’s driven in part by the relationship between people consuming something that means a lot to them typically in teenage years, where impressions are really vivid. Then 20 years later, you find that people consume it again as part of the life cycle of contemporary western pop culture.”

“Two projects — the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, Germany and firstsite:newsite in Essex, England — share a cultural thread: The arts organizations that will occupy them drove the design and development. By contrast, the arts organizations at the World Trade Center site have had to sit by and wait — or drop out — as plans evolved around them. The difference in this approach to a city’s cultural life will be made manifest in short order.”

Workers are building a new city in the jungles of Burma. It “is intended to project power and control, but the absurd new city in the malarial jungle speaks more of paranoia and megalomania. The new metropolis may even bring a little hope to the oppressed people of Burma, for in the long and tasteless history of totalitarian architecture the most extravagant building works are often the precursor to a regime’s collapse.”

The UK’s Arts Council is having its funding slashed a whopping 35% in order to help pay for the 2012 Olympics, and Lyn Gardner says that it’s time for the arts groups who stand to be devastated by the cuts to begin screaming from the rooftops. “Those who warned when lottery funding of the arts began that the arts should not be dazzled by the apparent cash bonanza but realise that the history of lotteries in other countries suggested that sales do decline, have been proved right in their predictions.”

“The Greek prime minister, deploying the strongest language yet for the return of the Parthenon marbles, yesterday said that Britain had run out of ‘feeble excuses’ to retain the treasures. At a ceremony to mark the return to Athens of two art works Greece has long claimed from the Getty Museum – and the imminent completion of a £94m Acropolis museum – Costas Karamanlis said it was only a matter of time before the sculptures’ repatriation.”

Becoming a successful stand-up comic is hard work. Becoming a successful female stand-up comic is brutal, even now, when most of the world has moved beyond the ridiculous old notion that women aren’t funny. “One of the rules of comedy-club booking goes like this: Only one female comic can play on the bill each night. Few clubs will ever exceed that quota.”

“Arts and cultural organizations in Michigan are reeling from a moratorium on state grant expenditures issued this week by Gov. Jennifer Granholm to deal with the state budget crisis. The moratorium on all state grants, which takes effect on Wednesday, will freeze payments to arts and cultural organizations for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.”