Category: issues

A study says that “slightly more than 20 percent of those who accepted tenure-track offers in Harvard’s main undergraduate college last year were women, down from 40 percent in 2004-5. Thirty-nine percent of tenure-track offers were to women last year.”

Southern California’s Orange County just opened a flashy new performing arts hall. But a study says spending on culture in this rich area is below average. “Orange County nonprofit arts groups had assets of $257 million, or $90 per capita — compared with $155 in Los Angeles and San Diego counties and $506 in Santa Barbara County. Orange County’s per-capita arts capitalization is 72% of the Southern California average of $124.”

Lawrence Weschler is putting his stamp on Chicago’s Humanities Festival. “The division between the sciences and the humanities is completely artificial and one that is extremely recent. Until 100 years ago, it was the arts and sciences. Michelangelo and Leonardo and so forth were scientists as much as they were artists. I am very much for getting the sciences in the humanities where they belong.”

These days everybody’s online. So that’s where the artists are going too. “The good news is there is plenty going on in technology to help artists create new works, arts organizations to support them and ultimately for art fans to experience them.”

Admit it: you smirked when you first read that Starbucks was going to start cross-promoting movies, music, and books alongside its $6 lattes. That’s okay – they expected the ridicule. “Yet the chain is increasingly positioning itself as a purveyor of premium-blend culture… [and] the more cultural products with which Starbucks affiliates itself, the more clearly a Starbucks aesthetic comes into view: the image the chain is trying to cultivate and the way it thinks it’s reflecting its consumer.

Conventional wisdom has long held that serious culture doesn’t stand a chance in Miami, a city known mainly for its miles of beaches and hard-partying tropical atmosphere. With the opening of a massive new performing arts center, that wisdom is being challenged like never before. But will the city’s ambitious cultural plans be enough to convince its residents to take in a play, or an orchestra concert? “Miami, after all, is the city that lost its symphony orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, only three years ago. An ambitious new design district has yet to generate significant street life. And sun town still isn’t much of a theatre town.”

“In June, after California-based Legacy Partners announced plans to build a residential complex featuring Maori themes and folk art in suburban Plano, the company received dozens of emails charging the company with cultural theft.”

“The lead prosecutor in the recovered Glenn Gould artifacts case acknowledged yesterday that evidence demonstrating defendant Barbara Moore personally stole two documents that once belonged to the celebrated pianist and composer from Library and Archives Canada (LAC) ‘is circumstantial.'” Prosecutors are seeking to prove that Moore lifted the items from the national archive when she worked there as a researcher in the 1980s. Moore maintains the items were a gift from her boss, who died in 1994.

“The area around Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was cleared for about two hours [Wednesday] while the city police department’s bomb squad investigated an odd- and suspicious-looking device on the sidewalk outside the building. The device — a yellow plastic tub about three feet long and one foot tall, with some clear liquid at the bottom and what appeared to be a bottle of bleach inside with a wire attached to a red blinking light — was determined to be harmless. There were no injuries or property damage.”

St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which serves as home base for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Opera, as well as hosting traveling theatre productions, is officially in the black for the fourth year in a row, following years of fiscal struggle. However, the center had to take $1.7 million out of its endowment to break even. “The Ordway is mulling a joint campaign with its resident arts organizations… to create [a separate endowment] that would help to underwrite the cost of performances at the Ordway.”