Category: issues

The foundation famous for its “genius” awards is giving money to up and coming non-profits. “The Creative and Effective Institutions Awards range from $250,000 to $500,000. The winners all have annual budgets of $2.5 million or less, and, though small, they are considered comers in their fields. The awards are an extension, of sorts, of the foundation’s famous five-year, $500,000 grants for creative individuals, but those “genius” grants have no strings attached. The grants to the non-profits were sized to meet specific needs or purposes.”

Liverpool’s Biennial is about to begin. But will the event have a culturizing effect on the city? “Culture is not a cure-all medicine for a city that has been in decline for 50 years. Of course there are economic benefits. But if you say it’s only about that then expectations start heading off in the wrong direction. And the actual difference made by culture is hard to gauge. Sometimes Liverpool looks less like a capital of culture than a culture of capital.”

Too many child prodigies burn out by the time they reach adulthood. “There are two basic issues here: how to support exceptionally bright kids, and how to manage exceptionally ambitious parents who blur the line between a child’s will and their own.”

“Not so long ago, celebrity gossip was a moribund art form, domesticated by punch-pulling softies like Liz Smith, neutered by the red-carpet suck-bots of Entertainment Tonight. Once urbane, sophisticated even, a fizzy cocktail of venom and cynical wit, celebrity gossip had flattened into tepid stuff, a supermarket staple aimed at housewives. But then the Web came along to resurrect it. Visual, voyeuristic, convivial to rumour and speculation, the Internet is to gossip what sheep dung is to azaleas.”

“True enough, the digital revolution has demonstrated the allure of thousands of tiny online affinity groups, many with real emotional meaning. In the music world, blogs and sharing sites are creating their own mini-communities of like-minded listeners. But that is happening underneath a continuing longing for a mass culture. The desire to listen to what the other kids are listening to, even when it’s lousy stuff, is as fundamental as speech and song themselves.”

The British government has announced tough new reforms for English schools in a back-to-basics approach. “We are changing the way we measure performance and toughening up the English and maths GCSEs to ensure that young people master the three Rs. In addition, coursework, which counts towards GCSE grades, will be overhauled in a bid to eradicate pupils cheating by using the internet, helping each other or receiving parental help. More work will be done under exam conditions at school.”

“Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has delivered $5 million in shots of adrenaline to nearly 250 artists, and in the process is creating a new template for private arts funding, using a mix of old-style grant-making and post-dot-com venture capitalism to re-imagine the relationships among artists, funders and markets.”

How do you reform the way Ph.D.-level education is taught without sacrificing the quality of the degree? There are some proposals: “One involves non-residential Ph.D. programs for students who are older than most who earn doctorates. The other involves doctoral programs that are run by more than one university — and that sometimes cross state lines and public/private distinctions. Officials at the meeting said they believed there was strong demand for both kinds of programs, and wanted to find ways for their agencies to encourage such innovations.”

New York’s Lincoln Center is undergoing a dramatic renovation, and the public will get a sense of what they’re in for this week when a massive pedestrian bridge above 65th Street is dismantled. The bridge demolition serves as a nice metaphor for the entire project, with planners hoping to “open the institution up to the city, making it seem more welcoming and less elitist both physically and in spirit.”

“As [San Antonio] begins the process of allocating almost $4 million in arts funding, officials are facing a budding dispute between next-door neighbors that has led to accusations of cultural racism and counter charges of attempts to stifle artistic freedom. At the heart of the dispute is the criticism by a prominent Jewish religious leader of the political undertones in an Esperanza Peace and Justice Center cultural program about the Middle East conflict.”