Category: issues

Violence erupted in the Middle East over the weekend as crowds of Muslims protested Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. “Those attacks earned widespread condemnation from European nations and the U.S., which accused the Syrian government of backing the protests. The Danish foreign minister said: ‘enough is enough. Now it has become more than a case about the drawings: Now there are forces that wants a confrontation between our cultures. It is in no one’s interest, neither them or us.’ Syria blamed Denmark for the protests, criticizing the Scandinavian nation for refusing to apologize for the caricatures of Islam’s holiest figure.”

It’s easy to leap to the extremes of the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. “Perhaps these cartoons really do crystallize why Islam and the West are incompatible and must hunker down for a ‘long war.’ The only other option, it seems, is to remember that if vastly different worldviews can find no accommodation on a subject, then perhaps it’s too early, in human history, to have the conversation.”

Denver wants to be known as an arts city. But lots of cities want to be known as arts cities, and marketing efforts abound. So how exactly does a city distinguish its arts scene from others?

Muslims across the Arab world are protesting against European publications that have published cartoons depicting Muhammad. “Newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway and Switzerland have run some or all of the cartoons first commissioned by Jyllands-Posten’s culture editor, Flemming Rose. It is apparent that the demonstrations are the biggest, and the diplomatic reactions the most vehement, in countries where authoritarian regimes are under domestic pressure from Islamist opposition forces.”

Australian economist John Throsby has launched a shot at teh Australian government’s lack of a cultural policy: “It may reasonably be surmised that [the Prime Minister, John Howard] neither knows of, nor cares about, contemporary art in any of its manifestations.”

“In a protest with an unusual number of high-level signatures, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of its five members have fired off a letter assailing a Washington Post cartoon as ‘beyond tasteless.’ The Tom Toles cartoon, published Sunday, depicts a heavily bandaged soldier in a hospital bed as having lost his arms and legs, while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor, says: ‘I’m listing your condition as ‘battle hardened.””

The Welsh National Assembly has narrowly defeated a controversial plan submitted by Culture Minister Alan Pugh which would have bypassed the Welsh Arts Council and seen six of Wales’ largest arts groups funded directly by the Assembly. It didn’t take long for the official debate to descend into shouting and accusations of hidden agendas. “The truth of the matter is that he who pays the piper calls the tune,” said one Assemblyman opposed to the plan, which opponents feared would make arts groups vulnerable to interference by politicians.

Bob Geldof is in on a new arts center in Camden Town in the north of London. “There is a buzz about the Roundhouse that is reminiscent, to those of us who were kids at the time, of Camden Town in the Sixties and Seventies: a place where our world was remade in a purple haze of invention. The risk is high when you let the streets in, but what other way is there to understand what’s going on?”

The Culture Minister of Wales has proposed to change the way the Welsh Assembly funds the arts, taking the task of funding of the six largest arts organizations away from the Welsh Arts Council and letting the assembly fund them directly. “But opposition parties claim this breaches the principle of ‘arms-length’ funding of the arts – separating the politicians who hold the purse strings from the artists who receive the money – and could lead to political interference. They plan to use Wednesday’s assembly debate to vote through an amendment which would force a public review and consultation process.”

An interim fundraising campaign for Kansas City’s proposed new performing arts center has fallen well short of its $45 million goal, and backers aren’t sure whether they will have enough cash on hand to begin construction in the fall as originally planned. The center has been a long time in the planning process, and debates have sprung up over everything from its cost (somewhere north of $330 million) to its proposed downtown location.