Category: issues

“In a move likely to upset traditionalists, cheer modernists and widen the gulf between them, the U.S. General Services Administration has bypassed classicist Thomas Gordon Smith for its influential chief architect post and instead has chosen Les Shepherd, a veteran architect at the agency… Controversy erupted in September after The Wall Street Journal reported that Smith [was] set to become the agency’s chief architect. Some modernists charged that Smith’s devotion to traditionalism would set back the GSA’s progress in improving federal design. Some traditionalists cheered the prospect of a return to the nation’s classical design past.”

The always-charged debate over child nudity in art is flaring again in Canada, thanks to an editorial decision by a photography magazine to remove several potentially controversial images from its latest issue focusing on what constitutes exploitative child porn. “The decision came after a time-consuming search failed to turn up a printer willing to risk a test of the Child Pornography Act passed in July, 2005. The debate over the images also resulted in the resignations of four members of BlackFlash’s volunteer board of directors.”

“An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.”

“The aim is certainly ambitious: to create a museum, unlike any other in the world, to celebrate the rich heritage of Liverpool. From prehistory to its days as a hub of the British empire, to the Beatles and Alan Bleasdale. But the £65m project to capture the city’s ‘creativity, its wit, its imagination, its sheer contrariness’ is already dividing opinion in Merseyside.”

Can an artist be dedicated to his craft and still maintain a healthy home life? Does parenting necessarily have to take precedence over art, and does the art have to suffer if it does? The answers all depend on whom you ask…

Fort Lauderdale may have lost its resident orchestra several years back, but the city is fast becoming a cultural hub in South Florida, where the arts have traditionally been a very tough sell. Chief among Fort Lauderdale’s assets is a top quality concert hall in a prime location.

“The report, Individual Donors to Arts and Culture Organizations in Canada in 2004, examined Statistic Canada data and found that 732,000 Canadians 15 years of age or older gave a total of $188-million to arts and culture organizations in 2004. This represents, on average, a donation of $257 per donor and is a record high.”

“Despite plenty of anecdotal evidence that arts projects can help prevent reoffending, the government has been reluctant to put money into investigating their long-term benefits. The response to any rise in violent youth crime has been to call for tougher sentences and more punitive regimes. But that is changing.”

Arts jounalism as a profession is being dismantled in the daily newspaper, writes film critic Roger Moore. “Reviewers, in general, are canaries in the print journalism coal mine, the first to go. Classical music, books, visual arts and dance are dispensed with, or free-lanced off the bottom-line. That’s happened everywhere I’ve ever worked.”

“Arts organisations had their worst fears confirmed this week after they were warned they face further ‘significant cuts’ in lottery funding as a result of a 40 percent hike in the cost of the 2012 London Olympic park.” The park will cost £900 million more than originally estimated.