Category: issues

Margie Reese “tried to hold the grant program steady as dollars dwindled from $13.3 million during her first full year running the department to the current $9.6 million — a 28% decrease. She also tried to maintain after-school arts classes in city-run neighborhood arts centers, feeling they were especially important for kids in poorer neighborhoods who could latch onto the arts to develop their talents and stay out of trouble. A defining moment for Reese came in 2004, when the budget office of then Mayor James K. Hahn proposed disbanding the Cultural Affairs Department as a cost-saving measure. Using her megaphone quietly, she rallied enough support to persuade City Hall to reconsider.”

“The art of selective quoting is one of the oldest games in the hype business, and readers are generally wise to it. Ellipses are not a good sign, and if an advertisement features quotes from critics pruned to just one word (“Brilliant!” — Joe Schmo; “Powerful!” — Betty Burns), chances are good the foliage surrounding them is less fragrant with affection.”

Student plagiarism has become a huge problem for teachers. “Teachers who still assign long papers — 10 pages or more with footnotes and bibliographies — often require students to attach companion essays that describe every step of their research and writing. Even then, teachers scour the Internet for suspicious turns of phrase. And some schools are paying thousands of dollars a year for software that scans work for plagiarism. Those programs reveal that about 30% of papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part.”

For a man accused of stealing millions of dollars worth of Italian antiquities, 88-year-old Robert Hecht doesn’t cut a very imposing figure. In fact, many in the art world say that the collector is being unfairly made an example of. “Hecht is a man who has seen the world pass him by. In the 1950s, shortly after his arrival in Italy, he bought antiquities on the streets of Rome. No one had a problem with it. The shops, Hecht said, would happily ship the ancient cups, coins and statues out of the country if you couldn’t take them home yourself. Now, Hecht finds himself on trial for allegedly doing the very things that were accepted practice half a century ago.”

When a major cultural site is looted, as happened with Iraq’s National Museum in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, a curious mix of artistic concern and nationalist passion dictates what happens next. And whether the backdrop is the wartorn Middle East, tribal Africa, or the supposedly “civilized” West, “the elegant lingo of art curators [falls] by the wayside in a high-stakes tit-for-tat.”

Issues of diversity and assimilation are nothing new in France, but religious and ethnic tensions have been running particularly high of late, and a new museum celebrating “tribal arts and culture” is sparking new battles in an old debate. “Some critics say the decision to show indigenous art in isolation could create or reinforce a ‘them and us’ mentality.”

“Hoping for leniency in a coming trial, an accused tomb robber led Italian officials two weeks ago to a startling discovery on a sun-scorched hilltop here: the oldest Etruscan burial chamber ever found. The tomb, dating from at least the seventh century B.C., was shown on Friday to reporters who were taken by bus to the site, less than 13 miles north of Rome. For now, archaeologists have named it the Tomb of the Roaring Lions.”

Philadelphia’s Kimmel center has had an economic impact of $321 million in three years, the center says. “About $177 million of that was attributed to direct-and-induced expenditures, $127 million to salaries and wages and almost $17 million to state and local tax revenue. The analysis showed that the Kimmel Center generated $3 for every $1 that it spent.”

UK Culture Minister Tess Jowell is defending the independence of Arts Council England. “The freedom to make decisions freely – without interference from the state or the market – has never been more important. The arts and culture are the means through which some of the most pressing issues confronting us can be – and in some instances only be – explored.”

Plans to convert New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory into an upscale performance venue hit a snag this week, when Lincoln Center canceled its plans for a production of Tristan und Isolde because of the high cost of preparing the space. “The armory and Drill Hall, its 55,000-square-foot, column-free space, has long been eyed hungrily by performing arts presenters,” and the overall plan to renovate the armory shouldn’t be derailed by the cancellation.