Category: issues

There have been many attempts to shield children from entertainment that might be “dangerous” to them. “Stickers, chips and the alphabet soup of ratings represent just a few ways that freaked-out parents — or, more accurately, politicians pandering to freaked-out parents — have tried to control what their kids encounter in the media. And that desire for control is precisely where parents go wrong, says an emerging group of cultural observers and media and parenting experts. The key, they say, is to parent within the new technological realities, not in spite of them.”

Robyn Archer’s abrupt resignation from leading Liverpool’s Capital of Culture program has left the effort adrift, writes Norman Lebrecht. “There is no disguising the sense of crisis in a vacuum of artistic leadership. Nobody in Liverpool seems prepared to take a decision on the Culture Year, let alone the helm, and the announcement from Manchester this week of a widely respected director for its expanding International Festival has further emphasized the glaring vacancy 25 miles down the road.”

Simon Reade, artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, explains in a “Dear Tony” letter to the prime minister why he’s thinking of voting Tory. “I know we’ve hardly met, but you have really let me down. I work in the most liberal of professions, the theatre. I am an artistic director, a producer/artist/leader of an innovative creative industry. But now, like luminaries of the arts world who in 1979 voted for Margaret Thatcher, I am thinking of voting Tory. And it’s your fault, Tony.”

A $25 million “Creation Museum” is being built in rural Kentucky. It features dinosaurs and Adam and Eve. “Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago. ‘If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there’.”

Brooklyn is booming, and with the boom there are plans for an extraordinarily ambitious cultural district. “Over the next decade, on four sites covering about 10 city blocks, the BAM LDC wants to build several large developments that will, if realized, drastically alter the landscape of Fort Greene and abutting parts of Downtown Brooklyn.”

Steady income, financial know-how and health insurance aren’t impossibilities for artists after all. “Mostly self-employed or relying on part-time teaching jobs, many artists tend to have shaky finances and scant prospects for improving them aside from going into another profession. But some institutions have sprung up in recent years to try to help — and ideally thrive financially at the same time.”

“Plans are being drawn up for a new university for Scotland which will be the fourth largest in the country. Senior officials from Paisley University and Bell College in Hamilton are currently holding talks about merging the two institutions and creating a new university for 18,000 students… The idea is to create a university which is large enough to tackle the chronic problems of under-representation in higher education in the west of Scotland.”

Toronto is starting a new arts festival, and modesty isn’t on the agenda. The fest, to be launched in 2007, will be called Luminato, and “organizers hope [it] will boost the city’s profile worldwide and one day rival international arts events in Edinburgh, Venice and Sydney… The 10-day festival will feature mostly free events, including two street festivals. And it will showcase world premieres of works of art, including a spoof of Handel’s Messiah called Not the Messiah, written by Eric Idle and John Du Prez, of the Tony-award winning Spamalot musical. The new oratorio will be based on Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will perform the piece.”

In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, New York officials talked of rebuilding Ground Zero as not only a business center, but a thriving downtown neighborhood filled with cultural offerings. In the years since then, nearly all the arts groups that planned to move to the site have been shunted aside due to politics and developer infighting, and now, with the dissolution of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the city’s arts supporters fear that cultural plans for the site will be scrapped altogether.

Arts managers and board members are fond of explaining to anyone who will listen that, in order to survive in today’s world, arts groups “need to learn to operate more like a business.” Andrew Taylor says it’s a profoundly unhelpful bit of advice. “Most businesses are poorly run, and many business practices correlate with mediocrity, not greatness… Business tools are merely ways to see the world, and ways to structure our interaction with it. Let’s be like the artists around us and explore those tools with creative abandon.”