Category: issues

Madison, Wisconsin’s three-year-old Overture Center for the Performing Arts is in a financial hole, plugging shortfalls with money it won’t be able to replicate in future years. A 29% drop in ticket sales and an over-reliance on those sales to meet budget goals aren’t helping, either. The center is hoping that an aggressive fundraising campaign can keep it from having to ask city or state officials for a bailout.

A big tobacco company is breaking up. “What this has to do with the arts landscape in New York City might not be immediately clear — until one looks at the list of cultural organizations that Altria has supported, and which may not continue receiving support once its individual operating companies control the philanthropic purse.”

The Guardian’s critics recently began blogging. It’s taken a little getting used to. “I’d like to think this was a good thing. Certainly, it is an education. Like backroom comedy writers dragooned into performing late-night stand-up in a club full of tetchy drunks, this paper’s critics have had to learn to deal with hecklers very quickly.”

Last week, the Kansas City Symphony filed the suit against the state of Missouri, claiming the Legislature has shortchanged the Missouri Arts Council Trust Fund by $83 million since 1987. The organization is seeking to force lawmakers to come up with the funding.” But “nonprofit arts organizations across the state fear the suit may have alienated Governor Matt Blunt, who will make budget announcements Jan. 24.”

The arts are supposed to be for everyone. But it’s one thing to talk about wiping out elitism and racial inequality in access to portrait galleries and symphony orchestras. To actually entice new crowds to partake is entirely another.

“Last week images of the execution of Saddam Hussein were beamed around the world. News travelled much more slowly in June 1867, when a political execution took place under very different circumstances: the idealistic emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who had been installed three years earlier by a French intervention, faced a firing squad of resurgent nationalists. Learning the news, Edouard Manet made some of the greatest of all political paintings.”

The prolific Tang Dynasty was extinguished by a shift in monsoon weather patterns, says a study. “Famed for a flowering of art and literature and for prosperity brought by trade with India and the Middle East, the dynasty spanned nearly three centuries, from AD 618 to 907, before it was overwhelmed by revolt.”

“A Senate bill that proposes a constitutional amendment to increase the state’s sales tax by three-eighths of 1 percent and dedicate the money for water, wildlife preservation, arts and the humanities was introduced on Thursday and fast-tracked for its first committee hearing.”

Remember all those Egyptian mummies that caused such a stir in American museums a couple of decades back? Yeah, well, Egypt would like them back, if you don’t mind. (And even if you do, actually.) “Egypt’s lead sleuth in the country’s hunt to reclaim ancient antiquities has gained a reputation for often strong-arming curators and bullying museum directors. But while he’s attracted critics in his hunt for Egypt’s mummies and pharaonic masks, his hard-nosed techniques are indeed paying off.”

Australians’ sharp snse of humor has very old roots. “When Charles Darwin visited Australia in 1836 on his epic voyage that gave rise to his theory of evolution, he was struck by the Aborigines’ talent for mimicry. At a corroboree, Darwin observed as the men imitated animals and re-enacted hunts and battles around the campfire, to the great amusement of the tribe.”