Category: issues

A conference in LA discusses what works. “Newspapers are still the dominant source of information about arts events, but e-mail is becoming increasingly important. About $30 billion was spent online in the 2005 holiday season, an increase of 30% over 2004. The average age of online users is 49, but all age groups are users. Sixty-five percent of users are women, and of them, 47% have postgraduate degrees. Household incomes of those using the Internet average $75,000.”

Getting quality board members for arts organization is a problem. So one Boston program is trying to change that, training and placing business executives on the boards of local arts and cultural organizations. “Leaders in the arts community say graduates of the program have been a boon for arts and cultural organizations that are competing for a smaller pool of funds.”

“Expert opinion in the media used to drive culture. Now, it’s peer recommendations. Already, consumers can sample a broader range of critical opinion on the Internet — some of it relevant and thoughtful, covering products that wouldn’t ordinarily be reviewed by the mainstream media, and some of it biased or one-dimensional. And marketers, such as movie studios and book publishers, are trying to figure out how Internet tastemakers figure into their relationship with their customers.”

Everyone’s watching this year’s Jazz Fest in New Orleans for signs of the city’s recovery. “Music in New Orleans has always been entertaining, but never just entertainment. It held on to cultural memories, negotiated between Old and New World aesthetics, and bound together families, neighborhoods and communities. It’s party music, but it’s also a secular ritual. And while the city has spawned far more than its share of gifted musicians, its music was not created from the top down.”

New Orleans’ JazzFest is being touted as the rebirth of a great American city. “Yet as the tourists tuck in to crawfish Monica and fried turkey po’boys, you can’t help wondering what this joyous celebration at the city’s race track — largely unscathed in the storm — really means. Is it about the rebirth of a community through the power of music — or could it just be the last hurrah of an environmental basket-case which the pessimists are tipping as ‘America’ s Atlantis’, the first city to be drowned by global warming?”

As “personal technology creeps deeper into our lives, the gaps narrow – between the daring and the dilettantes, between the rebels and the ready-for-prime-time, between making donations at the door and being on hold with Ticketmaster. We’re all online. The Web’s no longer a fringe medium. The individualists have been blogged, kicking and screaming, into the open. Some artists have traded their obscurity for practical considerations – like survival, and a wider audience. Some have sacrificed their avant-garde cachet for cash. With the so-called underground only a log-on or a picture-phone image away, is it dead, or has it just, inevitably, changed with the times?”

“The viral is where words, spoof images or film clips, You’ve Been Framed moments, guerilla marketing, cultural subversion and the unsuspecting celebrity all meet – and get spread around the internet community through personal contact. Once it would be nothing more than a text-only joke but, with broadband nearly everywhere and editing software ever more sophisticated, so virals have upped the stakes. The viral email has become such a phenomenon that the ICA is hosting the first exhibition devoted to it…”

The Kennedy Center will stage a major festival of Arab art. “We don’t know enough about what other people are about. We read about government and politics. That doesn’t say anything about what they like, what they find beautiful. Also, the idea starts from my rather naive belief that arts create peace.”

Prosecutors in the art theft trial of former Getty Museum curator Marion True and art dealer Robert Hecht are weaving a complex tale of antiquities fraud, using dozens of documents to establish a pattern of misconduct. The latest testimony in the case has focused on a Sicilian antiquities dealer whom prosecutors allege had illegal dealings with collectors and museums around the world.

“The swastika’s recent marginalisation is undeniable. Where it was once an ancient symbol of love, laughter, joy, peace and good luck for cultures across the world, the days when an innocent civilian or institution could display a swastika willy-nilly are now long gone since Adolf Hitler appropriated the symbol for his Nazi party, which ended up taking control of Germany and systematically murdered at least 9 million people and caused a war in which 50 million more died. Since Hitler, things have been quite difficult for the swastika. This reality has been particularly hard hitting for the branch of [a London bank] which, it turns out, has two of the provocative symbols on display in mosaics on the floor of its entrance.”