Category: issues

There are books, music, art that defy criticism. They are what they are. “Nature doesn’t owe us perfection. Novelists don’t either. Who among us would even recognize perfection if we saw it?”

Moses was bullish, visionary and imperial. He was impatient with obstacles, whether human, financial or topographical, and never saw a problem that engineering couldn’t solve. If the poor resented having to move out of the slums he wanted to clear, into other slums he chose not to know about, so be it. He was building a global capital, and for that he was willing to inflict a lot of pain.

“There has been a steady exodus over the years, but it has recently become Topic A in a land already saddled with one of the most rapidly aging and shrinking populations of any Western nation. With evidence that more professionals are leaving now than in past years, politicians and business executives warn about the loss of their country’s best and brightest.”

That’s the allegation of several departing staffers at Orange County, California’s struggling Performing Arts Center. President Terrence Dwyer’s former second-in-command “characterized him as an inaccessible leader who discontinued customary weekly meetings with department heads… Among those who have left are the fundraisers in charge of special events and donations received through trusts and wills.”

The job of a librarian probably sounds like a nice, quiet, intellectual profession. But when the library in question is in Baghdad, it’s anything but. The director of Iraq’s National Library has been keeping an online journal detailing “the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.”

“Another workplace-based fundraising campaign, similar to the United Way drive but designed to support arts and culture, launches next week in Kansas City. The regional ArtsKC Fund will begin with a ‘beta test’ in 27 area workplaces… Other workplaces will roll out their campaigns throughout this month, March and April. Planners have modest goals for the inaugural campaign: They hope to raise $150,000.”

“The federal cultural agencies and museums received solid support yesterday from the White House in the proposed budget for fiscal 2008. … In the president’s proposal, the National Endowment for the Arts is to get $128.4 million,” an increase of $4 million, while the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Humanities see larger budgets as well.

“As Cambodia has settled into peace and opened to the world, the temples of Angkor have in recent years gone from stone to gold for the national government. This year, a deluge of tour operators is expected to cart in nearly 1 million foreign visitors, a sixfold increase since 2000. … The growth has put the Cambodian government in a difficult position, observers say, forcing it to balance the potential to make money against the need for preservation, restoration and study.”

“Today in academe the core freedom for faculty to choose is under attack. It has long been argued that faculty members should have the ability to construct their own courses within a general framework so long as that course covered certain topics, and was done so with the proper amount of intellectual rigor. This long tradition of choice is now besieged on campuses across the country by both committees and student activists.”

“For years now, Gulf Arabs have confused modernity with tall buildings, sophistication with the ability to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and true education with the construction of gleaming, albeit vacuous, campuses. But whenever they have encountered gray matter — questions of taste and the arts — their mercantile approach has crumbled.”