Category: issues

“Beginning March 31, combined admission to EMP and SFM will drop from $26.95 to $15 for adults, and from $19.95 to $12 for kids and seniors. The price cut comes after six years of criticism from some community members who felt that the cost of admission made the museum a tourist destination, rather than an educational and recreational resource for locals.”

“With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.”

“Beauty is a product. It takes time, it takes work, it takes sacrifice, it takes marketing and trend-making and finally it takes money. No woman or guy wakes up beautiful in the morning. The beautiful is a result of smart life choices, smart shopping choices, smart diet choices, smart makeup choices, smart outfit and accessories choices and even smart chair-stylist choices.”

“It is hardly surprising that lots of rich kids go to America’s richest colleges. It has always been so. But today’s students are richer on average than their predecessors. Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, in a sample of eleven prestigious colleges, the percentage of students from families in the bottom quartile of national family income remained roughly steady– around 10 percent. During the same period the percentage of students from the top quartile rose sharply, from a little more than one third to fully half.”

In the 1990s the NEA’s budget was slashed by 40 percent by a Republican Congress. “Part of the rationale for the federal cuts in the 1990s was that private funding could fill the void. But the share of philanthropy being directed to arts organizations also has declined since 1992, said Robert Lynch, president and chief executive officer of Americans for the Arts. That drop represents an $8.4 billion loss to the arts in private sector giving.”

“According to the Minnesota Music Educators Association, there’s been a 6.5 percent decrease in the number of public school music teachers in the state since 2000. Many elementary schools now offer arts programs for just nine weeks out of the year. Nationally, arts education time in the classroom has dropped 22 percent since No Child Left Behind was enacted.”

Artists testified before the US Congress for an increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Committee chairman Norm Dicks “said in an interview Friday that he would like to restore arts funding to its $176 million peak but House Democratic leaders will determine how much the subcommittee can spend.”

According to insiders, this year’s Pulitzer finalists are: the LA Times’ art critic Christopher Knight and classical music critic Mark Swed. The third finalist is believed to be food writer Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly.”

As Americans for the Arts gathered in Washington, “the guest of honor was Robert MacNeil, the journalist, who gave a bold and perhaps even controversial speech that included sustained criticism of religious fundamentalism.” He decried “‘the swing to Puritanism’ that ‘gained energy when political consultants and lobbying organizations discovered the catnip (and the fundraising power) of pandering to those who could be persuaded that art is decadent, or immoral, or homosexual, and destructive of finer values.'”

“The world loves a long weekend in New York but, these days, prefers to make its home in London. New York has the nostalgia, London the future. New York defines the metropolitan, London the cosmopolitan.”