Category: issues

“The Denver School of the Arts has, in 16 years, grown into one of the most exclusive public schools in the Rocky Mountain region, admitting less than a third of the students who apply to get in every year. In auditions, artistic prowess trumps grades, determination, hardship and whether applicants even have a Denver address. [But] some community advocates and school-board members are concerned that the school is an oasis with a figurative moat around it; those who can afford private lessons are likelier to make the cut.”

You know that sick feeling you get when you find out that the guy in the airplane seat next to you paid several hundred fewer dollars for his ticket than you paid for yours? Well, increasingly, you can now get that same feeling in your local theatre or concert hall. “Sold-out houses — houses that are really sold out — seem heading toward the same extinction as hand-torn ticket stubs. For those willing to pay, in the future there will always be seats, just as there are always full-fare seats on a peak flight.”

Rumors have been swirling for months that Madison, Wisconsin’s much-celebrated Overture Center for the Performing Arts is in serious financial trouble. But “an informal survey of the larger resident arts groups that call Overture home” indicates that the fiscal problems have been exaggerated, and that the center is in no danger of bankruptcy.

It’s an old complaint – the annoyance of trying to enjoy a play or a concert while all around you fellow patrons are talking, unwrapping crinkly candy, or forgetting to turn off their cell phones – but no one’s ever really come up with an effective way of making the clueless aware of their own thoughtlessness. One Twin Cities director “sometimes makes a pre-show announcement asking that the six audience members closest to the guy with the ringing cell phone beat the living expletive-deleted out of him until he can get there.” That might do it…

“The City of London Corporation has announced that BBC Proms director Nicholas Kenyon, 55, is to be the next managing director of London’s Barbican Center, effective Oct. 2007. The appointment surprised commentators who had expected the center’s Artistic Director Graham Sheffield to get the job.”

Arts Council England has been out asking the public about perceptions of the Council. But it may not like what it hears: “Participants spoke of their perception that large, flagship companies receive the lion’s share of arts funding, yet produced work that was inaccessible to ordinary people.”

A proposal by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes in New Orleans has set off a fierce battle over issues of race, class, and equality. Nicolai Ouroussof sees a huge Washington-style mistake about to insert itself into already chaotic post-Katrina New Orleans. “In its rush to demolish the apartment complexes — and replace them with the kind of generic mixed-income suburban community so favored by Washington bureaucrats — the agency demonstrates great insensitivity to both the displaced tenants and the urban fabric of this city.”

Despite opposition from other Missouri arts groups, the Kansas City Symphony is proceeding with a lawsuit intended to force the state to release tens of millions of dollars in funding that was originally intended for the arts, but was later diverted to other purposes by legislators. The state attorney general claims that the KCS has no legal standing in the case, but lawyers for the symphony are asking for a summary judgment upholding their complaint.

“Next year, the eyes of the world will be on the city as European Capital of Culture. The show might be seen as a pre-emptive shot, to prove that Liverpool has always been on the cultural cutting edge. But it also raises the question of how artistic movements emerge, and whether such golden ages can be artificially manufactured.”

“An entire new alphabet has wormed its way out of the corners of Whitehall bureaucracy to try to stop the arts world from doing what it really needs to do – provide wonderful art. What this new alphabet shows, this new ABC of the arts, is how far the arts world, the way we look at it, the way we run it, has been transformed yet again within five short years. It has not been transformed in its own terms; rather in the concepts by which it is judged, managed and evaluated. The creative fertility of bureaucrats has an unstoppable energy of its own.”