Category: issues

“After five years of sagging circulation and advertising, new managers at the Times are pushing for more coverage of Hollywood and celebrities. They want shorter stories and more regional reporting in the intensely competitive bedroom communities around Los Angeles.”

In 1998, Denver’s major performing arts organizations began selling their tickets through a single service run by the Denver Center. But the combined ticket selling hasn’t gone well, and one by one, the organizations have gone back to selling their own tickets. Denver Center “did a great job for a lot of years, but they had to serve a lot of clients, and a lot of clients with really different needs. And then ‘The Lion King’ would go on sale, and it would be overwhelming for everybody,”

“It’s not easy to pinpoint the day culture died at ground zero. Since four cultural organizations were selected for the site a year ago, the notion of giving the arts an integral role has been gradually – and more lately precipitously – slipping away. At this point, culture is being cast as a suspicious interloper… A lack of powerful, outspoken advocates seems to have been a significant ingredient in the erosion of culture at the site. By putting the development corporation in charge of choosing the cultural groups, the state failed to enlist an enthusiastic commitment from business leaders and philanthropists.”

The ten-year program is designed to “help the 80 Los Angeles County school districts develop plans for putting arts into the curricula for all students and to encourage school boards to work toward committing 5% of their operating budgets to arts education. It is a modest program, at least in terms of making up for years of diminished funding for the arts. Many of the county’s 1,800 public schools provide a spotty arts program at best. And, the emphasis on standardized testing coupled with district budget shortages in recent years have left arts educators wondering whether their subjects will ever be a school priority.”

“Some artists—painters, for instance—have always been able to produce work themselves, relatively cheaply. Others, like musicians and filmmakers, had to pay for studio time, which proved prohibitively expensive for those without corporate backing. Now systems like ProTools enable musicians to produce top-quality recordings from a home studio for a fraction of the outlay. The new technology has given aspiring artists an unprecedented degree of control over their careers.”

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has attacked a proposed international pact that would give governments more power to protect their own country’s artistic heritage. “He called the draft text a trade document designed to give governments power to protect such interests as a country’s film producers by keeping down foreign competition – not a protection for individual artists. Artists should have full freedom to share their work throughout the world, he said. ‘As I read it, it gives central governments the right to protection by prohibiting imports’.”

Michigan’s state legislature proposes cutting arts funding by 17.5 percent. “Cuts to the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs leave $9.1 million for grants, down 63% from a recent peak of $24.4 million in 2002.”

“With this month’s gala for the $46.9 million Figge Art Museum and the June debut of a $7.4 million skybridge that joins downtown to the riverfront and was designed by Chicago architects Holabird & Root, Davenport has signaled that it is repenting for past urban planning sins and recovering from the 1980s, when farm-equipment manufacturers here slashed thousands of jobs. And the city is using dramatic insertions of modern architecture to make its point. Aesthetically, the results are mixed.”

“An accounts receivable clerk at the Orange County Performing Arts Center has pleaded not guilty to embezzling more than $1 million from her employer since 2000.”

There’s certainly something to be said for diversity of ideas and abilities; it produces a richer culture. But there’s also something to be said for declaring hierarchies of quality. “A whole society that adopted a policy of letting everything into the show, so to speak, would lose its ability to spot specialness and mediocrity and bankrupt the classical notion of art as a pursuit to be studied and developed by an artist over time.”