Category: issues

“The Joyce Foundation is giving $95,000 over two years to send local leaders of [midsize arts groups] to a new series of business seminars… The sessions will be open to arts leaders from around the country and led by business faculty from major U.S. universities.”

“As international authorities strive to harmonize a myriad of rules for carry-on flight luggage, a Russian-American jazz musician is nursing a broken arm he said he suffered in a struggle with French airport police over his right to board with a prized trumpet. The musician, Valery Ponomarev, 63, a former member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, was preparing to board an Air India flight on Sept. 9 from Paris to New York City, where he lives, when a routine airport ritual erupted into a fierce dispute over his 1961 Connstellation trumpet.”

What’s the No. 1 movie? No. 1 music? Book? The bestseller lists change so quickly it’s all a whir. And now it’s difficult to even agree on a definition of what being No. 1 is…

A small UK opera house has won against a government attempt to revoke its Tax break. The win has implications for all English charitable organizations.

“Cultural charities suffered a heavy blow today when the the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) lost its appeal to make admission income exempt from VAT.”

“Perhaps not since the early 1970’s, when Broadway introduced the TKTS booth, have the performing arts in New York seen such sweeping moves to draw audiences by offering inexpensive tickets. The discounts, underwritten for the most part by corporate donors, are an effort to compete for leisure time with an increasing array of multimedia offerings and, in an era when patrons of the theater, opera and classical music are aging rapidly, to reach a younger, more diverse population.”

“We so often stack [L.A.] up against New York or London. But those cities have been around for centuries. We’re post-adolescent… I don’t think Los Angeles has found its philosophy yet towards culture.”

“Every institution, from an opera company to a private foundation to a major newspaper, should have an articulate mission, a reason for being. But a performing arts institution needs a performing arts space that enables it to fulfill that mission.” In other words, quality architecture is as important as a quality performance.

The whole standing ovation thing is just completely out of control, and most in the arts would agree. But is it possible that the automatic ovation crowd is actually becoming even more annoying than they already were? “No longer content to give standing ovations to performances that don’t warrant them, the ovaters have begun to question why others aren’t standing too.”

Richmond, Virginia is home to a new Civil War Museum that addresses head-on America’s divergent viewpoints on race, regional pride, and the war that very nearly destroyed a young country. To do that, the museum presents, without judgment, the views of what it sees as the three distinct players in the Civil War struggle: Northerners, Southern Confederates, and the African-Americans caught in the middle. But not everyone is happy with the museum’s willingness to present the Confederate viewpoint without explicitly condemning it.