Category: issues

There is “a growing movement in Italy’s left-leaning artistic community that has galvanized against the center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ahead of a general election due in spring. The uprising in the arts includes a string of movies explicitly targeting Berlusconi, whose tight grip on the country’s media through his Mediaset empire provides plenty of ammunition to opponents with concerns about free speech.”

Dallas has beat out 20 other cities for a $1 million grant to study which children in the city’s public schools have access to arts education and find ways to get it to those that don’t.

The African country of Mali is very poor, and the Tuareg area of Essouk is among the poorest regions. The Tuareg have a festival, “which has evolved from an annual ‘Takoubelt’, or Tuareg gathering, that they’re marketing to attract tourists. “With almost no natural resources, its culture and especially its music are among the few things it can export.”

California State University at Fullerton has opened a new $48 million performing arts center. “Instead of the originally proposed single hall that would serve multiple purposes, Fullerton ended up with three theaters of different sizes specifically designed for dramatic, instrumental and choral performances. Overall, the new venues are much better suited to the college’s needs.”

“In the summer of 2004, 27 curators, theatre managers and other administrators were named as the inaugural fellows of the new £1m Clore Leadership Programme, designed to tackle a perceived deficit in training for leaders in the arts. It was hoped they would provide an answer to repeated problems of poor management in major national institutions and offer an alternative to the trail of Americans, Australians and Europeans who have arrived to head everything from the South Bank Centre to Tate Modern. And, it seems, they have.”

A Hong Kong legislative committee is criticizing the government for proceeding with a single developer for the city’s massive new cultural district.

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed education budget includes $100 million for art and music in the classrooms. This is a laudable step in the right direction, but it doesn’t address the critical need to restore the state’s arts infrastructure. The miserly million allocated to the California Arts Council was required to match a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funds from the arts license-plate program and other sources make up a total agency budget of $3.2 million. At its peak in 2001, the Arts Council had a budget of $32 million.”

The higher education workforce in the US grew by 4.4 percent to just under 3.3 million between 2003 and 2004. “Most of the growth occurred at public universities and at for-profit colleges, and much of it came among employees who provide instruction rather than among administrators.”

“Telecommunications giant Orange is to reduce financial support for arts north of the Border, which is likely to leave Edinburgh’s renowned film and book festivals with huge holes in their budgets. Other national companies are also expected to reduce sponsorship in Scotland because of sporting events such as the World Cup, which will soak up spare cash.”

A row has broken out between the Arts Council of England and the Assembly Government of Wales over what the English see as an attempt to impose political controls on the Welsh Arts Council. The Welsh Assembly wants to begin funding the largest arts groups in Wales directly, rather than allowing the Arts Council to divide up grants, and assembly members recently forced out the chairman of the Arts Council, who was speaking out against the plan. The Assembly would reportedly like to abolish the Arts Council altogether, but lacks the legal authority to do so. Instead, the planned funding transition would effectively strip the council of nearly all of its functions, while leaving it technically intact.