Category: issues

For a long time, arts benefactors in the U.S. tended to be ultra-rich businesspeople wanting to create a cultural legacy for themselves. But today, the giving pool is much wider, and is made up of donors from many income levels. In fact, many lower-level donors have begun pooling their resources to form “giving circles,” which can have a major impact.

“In many discussions about art, class is often the elephant in the room… There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about access to the arts. [But] who are these schemes trying to attract?” More importantly, once the supposedly disenfranchised are attracted, what makes anyone think they would have any interest, having been denied any real sort of art education previously?

A cotroversial ballot measure dedicating money raised by a new cigarette tax to arts and culture in the Cleveland area passed comfortably in Tuesday’s election. “The measure will raise the county cigarette tax by 1.5 cents per cigarette starting in January, generating about $20 million per year for 10 years for arts and cultural organizations and individual artists.”

The battle between a Chicago architecture critic and developer Donald Trump over a giant advertising kiosk promoting Trump’s ostentatious new high rise is continuing, even after Trump supposedly agreed to make changes. “With help from the ever-compliant City Council, the New York developer was able to plant his kiosk a block east of his Wabash Avenue property and on Chicago’s prime shopping boulevard. He then turned the kiosk from a sign that was supposed to point to the riverwalk along his tower into an advertisement masquerading as a public service.”

“Looking to become a major player in the Boston market quickly, New York-based Citigroup has purchased the naming rights to the Wang Center for the Performing Arts for about $34 million… Citigroup will pay the Wang over 15 years, a dramatic infusion of money for the once-booming nonprofit arts presenter, which has struggled to balance its budget — and fill seats — in recent years.”

Officials in the Indian state of Bihar ” want to train many of the estimated 100,000 homeless in the state to put on street plays about AIDS and to sing songs about it in trains and buses and on the sides of busy roads.”

“The Illinois Arts Alliance estimates that nearly 70 percent of Chicago-area arts organizations have female administrators (executive director or equivalent positions), based on an admittedly unscientific 2003 survey. ‘It’s a field that is predominantly female and predominantly white’.”

What will Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year look like? It will be culture in broad strokes. “Last night the Liverpool Culture Company honoured that broad definition when it unveiled its long-awaited programme, a £95m mixed bag of 70 events ranging from the Berlin Philharmonic and a Gustav Klimt exhibition to the European senior boxing championships and a footballers’ wives fashion show.”

The whole “world heritage site” designation has become meaningless, writes Germaine Greer. “If ‘world heritage’ means anything, it should mean that the recovery of human history is not a matter for nation states, but for the international community. Rather than leaving it to the individual governments to struggle to produce the right kind of application couched in the current UN twaddle, together with the detailed maps and inventories demanded by Unesco, and then find funding to keep the sites intact, the survival of human heritage should be a global project.”

A new study suggests that artists are increasingly creating hybrid careers. “Her findings indicate artists are increasingly dividing their time between their art–painting, sculpture, writing–and contributing their artistic talents to for-profit projects, such as advertising and graphic design.”