Category: issues

“Whatever kind of place New Yorkers will inhabit a century from now, it will probably not look much like the hallucinations that went on display briefly in Grand Central Station on Thursday and will reappear on the History Channel’s Web site (history.com) sometime next month. Since incremental change is too difficult to conceive, most designers imagined a post-apocalyptic Manhattan half-drowned by rising oceans.”

Forty-five European nations have “pledged to make three years the standard time for their undergraduate degrees by 2010. Under ‘the Bologna Process,’ named for the Italian city where the agreement for “harmonizing” European higher education was signed in 1999, degrees are supposed to be sufficiently similar that they will be recognized from one country to the next, encouraging student mobility. What happens when some of that mobility involves graduate study in the United States?”

Israeli artists have been grabbing headlines…

What should the future role of public funding be in the UK arts scene as more of the world transitions to an American-style system of private philanthropy? “Should the state help pay for the arts? Of course it should; it always has. State support for the arts is a great European tradition. The great patrons of the performing arts and the visual arts have always been rulers or monarchs. Now they are governments… Whether you are talking about 18th-century Vienna or the UK today, the wealth that was and is handed out to the arts is the people’s wealth. And it is absolutely right that it should be spent on the arts.”

“A new report by the National Endowment for the Arts on arts attendance and how it relates to volunteerism shows Americans 18 to 34 increasingly tuned out from the arts and the broader community.” Participation in the arts was down across the board, whether the subject was music, dance, opera, or even reading. On the plus side, those who did engage with the arts were 50% more likely to spend time volunteering.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been making good on his campaign pledge to slash government spending, and in the process, he’s been eliminating funding from cultural diplomacy projects. That’s got famed director David Cronenberg, among others, up in arms. “There is always this idea that the arts are superficial, kind of frivolous. The notion that they are fat to be trimmed from the body politic makes me nuts.”

“A [Turkish] court today acquitted a 92-year-old retired archaeologist who was put on trial for writing in a book that Islamic-style head scarves date back more than 5,000 years — several millennia before the birth of Islam — and were worn by priestesses who initiated young men into sex.”

Cultivating new generations of donors is an important part of any cultural organization’s mission, and if the cultivation comes with free drinks, so much the better. “As Baby Boomer contributors grow into white-haired audiences, more arts and philanthropic organizations… are establishing young professionals groups to cultivate new patrons and volunteers. They offer the opportunity to mingle with others and party with people 25 to 40 who share the same interests.”

What’s this? Arts funding an issue in the American midterm elections? And In Idaho?

“The world in general, but America in particular, relishes cautionary tales of great wealth causing great woe. Yet there can be little doubt that the house that Getty built has brought its own plague of miseries on itself, which can be comprehended without recourse to myths of supernatural interference the ancients needed to make sense of such otherwise inexplicable human folly.”