Category: issues

No, really. It’s time, writes Larry Williams. “Give us a ministry for arts! When the machinery of entertainment industry is set in motion the income that it will generate will drop oil ‘to a mere second place.’ Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby can earn 200 million Dollars in 24 months, can you imagine what a ministry of art can rake in from the different forms of art, sports, tourism.

In contrast to the for-profit world, non-profits in the Chicago are including more women on their boards of directors. A new survey “found that 94 percent of them had at least one woman director and 89 percent had at least one woman executive. Women accounted for 36 percent of all executive officers and 26 percent of all top earners at the 35 non-profits.”

Is a backlash growing against the Scottish Executive’s plan for cultural reform in Scotland? “Any government, no matter its hue, should show a caring and supportive attitude towards cultural activity and be prepared to put its money where its mouth is. The fact that our present one is not, but instead still believes it can fool the people with false figures, hyped claims and meaningless gobbledegook is very regrettable.”

“Barbara Fleischman, the New York art collector who with her husband donated and sold more than 300 prized antiquities to the Getty Museum in 1996 and then quietly made a personal loan to the curator who arranged the deal, resigned from the Getty board Wednesday.”

Architect Barton Myers has been chosen to design a new performing arts center for the city of Orlando, Florida. “Myers — a Los Angeles-based architect who has designed performing-arts centers in Newark, N.J.; Portland, Ore.; and Cerritos, Calif. — is known as an architect who avoids designing flashy structures that stand out from the landscape, such as Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Instead, Myers wants his work to fit in with — and add to — the cityscape around it.”

Charges of “anti-Turkishness” had proven an embarrasment to the government. “There is surely some irony in that fact that you can now be prosecuted in Europe for denying a genocide and prosecuted in Turkey for asserting that a genocide took place. For a country that has long created fictions out of its own past, it is all the more fitting then, that it is a novelist who starts the dialogue about what really happened.”

Canada’s culture minister Liza Frulla was defeated in Monday’s national election. “During Frulla’s tenure as culture minister, major issues on her plate included the introduction of satellite radio to Canada and the continued call for increased, stable funding for institutions like the Canada Council, the Canadian Television Fund and the CBC.”

“Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.”

Miami’s Concert Association of Florida and the under-construction Miami Performing Arts Center have postponed discussions of a merger of the two organizations. “It would have been a 50-50 financial split, and frankly, we both have too much to do at the time. It was the better part of wisdom for both of us to postpone it for a year or so.”

“A poll taken by the National Endowment for the Arts in September estimated damage to art institutions and performing-arts organizations to total at least $82 million — not including losses by individual artists.” Four months later, the arts are trying to rebuild…