Category: issues

“The Missouri Arts Council has canceled a program worth millions of dollars once promised to local arts groups. In the fiscal year beginning July 1, the Kansas City Symphony, the Kansas City Ballet, the Lyric Opera, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and 21 other arts organizations across Missouri will no longer receive annual payments from the council that would have reached tens of millions of dollars over time. The arts council gave no notice to any of the affected arts groups in October when it voted to end contracts with organizations participating in the Capital Incentive Program. The program allowed them to collect interest from the council’s endowment. Now, because of budget cuts and erratic state funding of the arts council, there is too little money to pay them.”

Upstate New York’s Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) has had a productive year, and if reports from within are to be believed, the organization is well on its way to healing the divisive splits that left it on the edge of insolvency a year ago. But time doesn’t stand still for rebuilding purposes, and SPAC is facing a daunting array of challenges in the year ahead, from expanding its audience base to expanding its board. A major marketing push is on tap, and audience services such as online ticketing are a priority as well. Still, SPAC needs millions of dollars to stabilize its depleted endowment, and is still trying to worm money out of the New York State Assembly for physical improvements.

“A former employee of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum is suing the museum and its executive director, claiming she was harassed and faced racial and disability discrimination before being unlawfully dismissed. Yvonne Wilson, 56, was the executive assistant to museum head Jane Werner… Ms. Wilson claims she was fired Jan. 18, after her superior said she was insubordinate and hostile in the workplace.”

2005 was a tough year for the arts in Detroit, with funding cuts and red ink dominating the cultural landscape. But if there’s a bright side to be found in the latest round of government funding pullbacks, it may be that arts advocates have been prodded to begin looking seriously at a diverse array of funding mechanisms that may provide more long-term stability than the whims of finicky politicians would ever allow.

The Electronic Records Archive, being undertaken by the U.S. National Archives at a cost of more than $300 million, is supposed to finally find a way to catalog all of the significant material that doesn’t fit on a piece of paper. As you might imagine, this is a monumentally complex project, and even the chief archivist doesn’t seem entirely certain where to begin. “The National Archives has been receiving electronic materials since 1970, but plans for long-term preservation of it all didn’t begin until 1998. And the government has only started to take it seriously in the past three years.The National Archives has been receiving electronic materials since 1970, but plans for long-term preservation of it all didn’t begin until 1998. And the government has only started to take it seriously in the past three years.”

“Art magazines are indulging in the celebritization of artists, but they’re bringing something stinky to the mix. Take ArtReview’s annual “Power 100 List” and Art + Auction’s “Power Issue,” both considered art world jokes since they first appeared in 2001 and 1996, respectively. Recently each came out with a list; both were based on money and as self-interested as ever. In addition to museum directors, mega- collectors, auction house bigwigs, art fair pashas, art advisers, and the below-average overhyped painter Marlene Dumas, both lists are stocked with the magazine’s advertisers and the artists they represent. It would be a hoot if it weren’t so craven.”

The center had an 11-year run. “The continuously declining availability of general operating support in the current funding climate is a common plight and growing threat to the long-term sustainability of the arts and the nonprofit sector at large. Unfortunately, the Center has proven not to be immune to it this year.”

Newcastle and Gateshead are the poster cities for cultural renewal. “Gone is almost all the industry – steel, coal, warehouses, shipyards, docks – that made this one of the world’s great manufacturing centres. Instead of a culture based on the dignity of labour and trade is a theme park of heritage sites and palaces of art, liberally sprinkled with restaurants and cafés. Nineteenth-century industry has been transformed into 21st-century leisure. They call it urban regeneration, and here they’ve invented a new civic identity to characterise it – NewcastleGateshead.”

Turkey’s foreign minister acknowledged yesterday that charges brought against Orhan Pamuk, the country’s best-known novelist, have tarnished Turkey’s image, and said laws that limit freedom of expression may be changed.