Category: issues

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not a connoisseur of the arts. But his administration has been the most supportive administration of the arts in a very long time. “Under Mr. Bloomberg, public art has flourished in every corner of the city – from ‘Element E,’ a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture in the center of the former Tweed Courthouse, to a classic limestone statue in the Bronx, to ‘The Gates,’ set up by Christo and Jeanne-Claude last winter in Central Park, a project for which he personally lobbied for almost a decade. The city’s art commission, once knee-capped by the Giuliani administration as an elitist irritant, has been empowered at the highest level, with a voice in every significant public-works project in the city.”

Some 150 countries have voted yes to a UNESCO convention that they say will protect cultural diversity. The US was not among the countries. “The US had said the ‘deeply flawed” convention could be used to block the export of Hollywood films and other cultural exports. The vote follows French moves to protect its film and music industries.”

“The Kennedy Center announced yesterday it is expanding its arts management initiative to include a concentrated program in New York. Called ‘Arts Advantage/NYC,’ it is a cooperative effort among the center, Time Warner and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Michael M. Kaiser, the Kennedy Center’s president, said the venture would use the techniques employed in consultations for minority arts organizations and mid-size American orchestras, but would focus on unique issues in the New York arts world.”

The union representing airline mechanics has been striking against Minnesota-based Northwest Airlines for two months now, with little to show for it. But the union has begun a strange strategy of attacking individual members of Northwest’s board of directors on unrelated fronts. One of the oddest attacks: a pamphlet distributed as presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was releasing her latest book, calling her “the great prevaricator” (a reference to Goodwin’s plagiarism scandal two years ago) and urging air travelers not to buy her books. Yes, Goodwin is a member of the Northwest board. But a real policy player at the airline? Alex Beam thinks not…

Is New York still the culture capital of the world? Was it ever? Lots of New Yorkers would certainly claim that it was, is, and will always be, but then, most New Yorkers also believe that the world ends just west of New Jersey. A realistic look at history reveals that “there was only a relatively brief time when New York City, no longer overshadowed by Europe, was universally considered the art capital of the world.” Worse, a good deal of serious art and culture is being replaced (not only in New York, but across America) by attention-grabbing “events” intended simply to draw huge crowds. “It is clear that the arts and culture have risen in importance for cities all over the world, which increases the competition for talent.”

Columbia University says it wants to be a player in the arts. The university’s president said he wanted the Journalism School to study the field of journalism as well as teach it. So why did the J-school ax the National Arts Journalism Program which served both purposes?

President Bush has made it very clear that he will veto any tax hike proposed by Congress, even with the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast spiralling into the hundreds of billions. That means that all that money will have to be shaved out of other government programs or added to the already bloated deficit. Conservatives, of course, are not traditionally fans of excessive deficit spending, so a group of Republican legislators has been meeting to hash out the necessary cuts to divert money to the rebuilding effort. And as you might expect, first on the GOP’s list of programs to be eliminated are government support for public television and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rebuilding America’s Gulf Coast will be one of the great design challenges of the age, and last week, a group of 200 urban planners and architects held a six-day conference to discuss the direction the rebuilding effort should take in 11 Mississippi towns devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The result could be a complete rethinking of suburban design in the area, as well as a fullscale overhaul for the city of Biloxi.

“A Franco-Canadian initiative, which has won broad backing as a swipe at US ‘cultural imperialism’, could mean that countries will be able to subsidise domestic film industries and restrict foreign music and content on their radio and television stations in the name of preserving and promoting cultural diversity.”

One hunbdred and fifty countries have signed a new agreement on cultural diversity. “The international agreement — formally the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions — reaffirms the right of sovereign states to ‘maintain, adopt and implement’ policies that protect and promote cultural expression, and exempt certain cultural products from free-trade agreements.”