Category: issues

“Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who learned her craft at the Baltimore School for the Arts before launching a successful film and television career, is donating $1 million to a major renovation and expansion campaign at the school, officials announced yesterday. The School for the Arts, considered one of the top public arts high schools in the country, plans to name its new theater the Jada Pinkett Smith Theater. At Pinkett Smith’s request, the theater will be dedicated to rapper Tupac Shakur, a former classmate who was shot and killed in 1996.”

The U.S. Senate approved a second four-year term for the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts on Monday, and also confirmed President Bush’s nominees to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory panel for the NEA.

Text messages from your favorite (or soon-to-be not-so-favorite) theatre company? Turns out that “marketing theatre by SMS has not only been going on for some time but is, in fact, a hotly contested issue which plummets us straight into all sorts of engagingly troublesome debates about public vs private and intrusion vs information in the digital age. There is no consensus whatsoever, it seems, on whether marketing by text is the new frontier of theatre ticket sales or a noxious further erasure of the boundaries of personal space.”

“Women buy roughly half of all CDs sold, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, and most radio formats target women as their primary audience. Yet, according to the A&R Registry, a directory of professionals in the field, no woman runs the mainstream music A&R department at any major record label. Over the last decade, only two women have helmed A&R pop departments at major labels. The department is the heartbeat of any record company; these talent scouts discover and develop the acts that people hear on the radio and whose CDs they buy.”

The arts in England have done well in funding in recent years. But “over recent weeks, some arts boardrooms have veered from paralysis to near-panic. Anticipating austerity, large organisations like the Royal Opera House put in frugally for nothing more than inflation-proofing of their present grant, only for the Treasury to spring a calculated leak that the arts are scheduled for something between zero increase and a five percent cut.”

“After nearly 20 years of being shut out in the cold, arts and culture have finally found their way back onto the political agenda: During the election campaign, three candidates made increased government arts funding a priority in their platforms. Which can only be a good thing, say those in the arts and their supporters. Despite its flush of oil revenues, Alberta currently ranks 11th out of the 13 provinces and territories in its per capita funding for the arts.”

“The opera house that dropped a production featuring the severed head of Muhammad over security fears suffered an embarrassing setback shortly before the disputed show resumes: It lost the offending prop. The head of the Islamic prophet as well as those of Jesus, Buddha and Neptune that were used in the three-year-old production of Mozart’s Idomeneo have gone missing.”

Michael Kaiser has been ambitious since the day he took the reins at Washington’s Kennedy Center. “For the past three years, Kaiser, who volunteers as a cultural ambassador with the U.S. State Department, has helped arts organizations in other countries improve their planning, marketing and fundraising, and he has brought artists from Iraq, China and elsewhere to the U.S… He and the Kennedy Center have focused their training efforts in countries that are ‘in transition and in trouble’ — including Pakistan and Iraq — because that’s where art can have the greatest impact.”

In New York, a play, concert series, or art exhibit can be made or broken on the say-so of a handful of extremely influential critics. So how do the artists who submit their work for the approval of such tastemakers feel about the job the critics do? Time Out New York found out, and the results were, well, predictable.

AJ blogger Apollinaire Scherr, who also serves as dance critic for Newsday, was one of the critics put to the test in Time Out‘s survey, and she came out of the fire unscathed. But she also feels that the process used to conduct the survey was seriously flawed, from the selection of critics discussed to the inclusion of publicists on the judging panel.