Category: issues

Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery may be small, but it houses the remains of a stunning array of internationally known individuals, from authors John Keats and Mary Shelley to Communist crusader Antonio Gramsci. These days, though, the cemetery is in serious disarray, and has been placed on the World Monument Fund’s 2006 Watch List of the 100 most endangered sites on earth. “Many of its important monuments are crumbling like the bones they mark, damaged by pollution and years without archaeological maintenance.”

The Danish cartoons currently sparking so much violence in the Muslim world have put Western authorities in a tough spot. On the one hand, “they’re callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression.” But “the new Molotov cocktail of technology and incendiary art has hastened the speed with which otherwise forgettable pictures are now globally transmitted.” As a result, unthinkable violence results, and the West is left scrambling to mitigate the damage.

“When art brushes up against politics in San Francisco, the results can often seem surreal,” and columnist Ken Garcia has some pointed questions for the mayor’s new arts task force. Balancing the needs of the city’s major arts organizations with those of smaller groups is an ongoing problem, and the task force’s proposal does little to address it, Garcia alleges. “[Also] lost in the funding frenzy was the fact that San Francisco already spends more money per capita on nonprofit arts organizations than any U.S. city, nearly $15 for each of its 750,000 citizens.”

“The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom — freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives? A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend.”

George Bush’s proposed $2.77 trillion budget doesn’t include any big increases for culture. “The modest boost will most likely offset inflation but not give enough cushion to try new things. On the other hand, none of the agencies received sizable cuts.”

Canada’s new Conservative government has named Beverley Oda, the first Japanese Canadian elected to parliament as the country’s new minister of culture. “In addition to working at Global Television and CTV, Oda helped launch Canada’s First Multilingual Television station (CFMT), which is now Omni 1. A winner of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, Oda was also inducted into Canada’s Broadcast Hall of Fame in 2003.”

The Canadian arts community is pleased by the selection of Bev Oda as the new culture minister. But “some suggest that the concern isn’t about Oda, but the new drive to make the path of money through federal agencies more transparent and accountable. The worry is that this could slow down promised funding increases, particularly the past Liberal government’s pre-election promise in November to double the budget of the Canada Council for the Arts, the umbrella arts funding agency, in three years to $301-million.”

“Traditionally, if you look at our cultural institutions, most of them employ women in equal numbers. Women are certainly prominent in middle management. There is no question that women are good at what they’re doing – but what they’re generally doing is supporting male directors. There are, for sure, some art galleries with women directors. But if you start looking at national museums and galleries, no, there aren’t. And if you start looking at orchestras in general, no again; we’ve got one woman director of an orchestra [the LSO]. There are fantastically few women film scriptwriters. Why should that be? These are bastions of male leadership.”

The Getty has seen its reputation tarnished over a series of missteps. Christopher Knight has five ideas he thinks would put Getty at the center of LA’s cultural life.

“We know why science exists — to find a cure for cancer, fly us to the Moon or invent those weird bars of metal soap that claim to get the smell of chopped onions off your fingers and which, amazingly, actually work. But what about art? Determining the function and quantifying the success of a painting or a piece of music is almost impossible. Or is it?”