Category: issues

Kansas City has a thriving performing arts scene, but residents could be excused for failing to notice that fact. “The little-discussed truth is that in Kansas City, the performing arts often remain a slumbering giant. Their head counts number in the hundreds of thousands annually, and their concentration of world-class talent, both imported and residing locally, is way out of scale to our city’s population… But somehow the message is not yet getting across, for reasons not easily explained. A buzz doesn’t happen overnight. But every group large and small is responsible for its part. And the time is now to start.”

Members of the Wikipedia community are proposing the creation of a Wikiversity. “It’s not clear exactly how extensive Wikiversity would be. Some think it should serve only as a repository for educational materials; others think it should also play host to online courses; and still others want it to offer degrees.”

Actor Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is “ridiculous.” “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” to air Sunday”I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.”

Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center has serious money woes. “Four years after opening as Philadelphia’s answer to Lincoln Center, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is still posting persistent deficits and is looking at a number of moneymaking ventures – from buying parking lots to stripping the front of its building with electronic advertising.”

“There’s a certain type of arts board-er who seems depressingly prevalent at the moment. He (usually he) has made a fortune in the City. He genuinely loves the arts. But he regards arts administrators as a bit amateurish and thinks the fact that he’s run a bank qualifies him to “know best” about running a theatre (though no one would think of putting Nicholas Hytner, say, on the board of a listed company). He may harbour frustrated artistic ambitions. He likes the idea of being invited to interesting parties, or getting a knighthood. It’s time for this attitude to be rooted out once and for all.”

Is there still a chance that some cultural vision will emerge for the site of the World Trade Center? “Given the intense emotions associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, some panelists suggested that the competing visions for the 16-acre site – memorial, business hub, neighborhood gathering place – were ultimately incompatible.”

New York Magazine critics have made their lists…

The city of Charlotte’s Public Libray and its Children’s Theatre decided to collaborate on a new home. “Occupying a city block in ‘Uptown Charlotte’—the growing cultural hub of the city—this freestanding, 102,000-square-foot, two-month-old building is radical for a number of reasons. For one thing, when library and theater leaders agreed to create a joint-use facility, instead of just building a structure that would house both institutions side by side, they took a far riskier step—creating a daringly original space with its own identity and, eventually, its own life.”

“The arts matter because they are local and relevant to the needs and wishes of local people. They help citizens to express their needs and to clothe them in memorable forms. They offer a way of expressing ideas and wishes that ordinary politics do not allow. The arts regenerate the rundown and rehabilitate the neglected. Arts buildings lift the spirits, create symbols that people identify with, and give identity to places that may not have one. Where the arts start, jobs follow. Anywhere that neglects the arts shortchanges its people.”

“Promiscuous Picasso, Lord Byron the philanderer, Dylan Thomas the boozy womaniser: these were not simply bonking Bohemians, it seems, but artists doing what their genes told them to do. According to the researchers the greater the artistic endeavour, the larger the sexual appetites. (There are some obvious exceptions to this rule: Julio Iglesias once boasted that he had had sex with 3,000 women, but has never yet sung a decent song.) Artists have more sex, of course, because that is what they are expected to do. As rule breakers, they are assumed to act on impulse, unconstrained by the mores that apply to the rest of society.”