Category: issues

NEA chief Dana Gioia says that rebuilding the arts of the Gulf Coast is essential to rebuilding the region. “People have to recognize that the arts are a major industry and need to be at the table for the recovery plan. There is no way for these local economies to recover unless we invest in the cultural life. Culture was Louisiana’s second-biggest economy, right after oil. These organizations have suffered enormous losses.”

“Since Katrina slammed into this region of soggy landscapes and resolute people, Baton Rouge has become a temporary command center for businesses and planners drawing up blueprints for the area’s comeback. Many artists, on the other hand, have passed over the buttoned-down state capital and headed for laid-back Lafayette. It’s likely that hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians, artists, photographers, writers, designers and other creative talents have fled New Orleans in Katrina’s wake, both the world-famous and the not-so-famous. Some have strayed as far away as Memphis, Nashville, Houston, New York and Los Angeles.”

Hurricane Katrina disrupted the culture of the Gulf Coast. But it’s also had a subtle effect on the arts across the US…

A conference in New York about artists’ responses to 9/11 was attacked in advance. “The conference was built on the solid premise that mourning and remembrance evolve over time, and that art of all kinds – challenging, comforting, even rude – is a valuable element in the process. That doesn’t deny that the grief is still raw for many people, and may always be. But the media attacks on the show were hardly about grief. At best they display a yahooism that says art doesn’t matter, at worst a political agenda that says anti-government opinions have no place in any event linked to 9/11.”

“Last year, the city hosted more than 10 million visitors, many to sample that cuisine and music scene, and was on track this year to eclipse those figures. The city also was having success with tax incentives to film companies, making it possible for the filming of “All the King’s Men,” “The Skeleton Key” and parts of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and other films. Now, the bedrock and lifeblood of the city and the culture that it spawned have been threatened by flood waters and disease and a forced exodus.”

What’s the art coming after 9/11 look like? “Artists are apt to weigh in early and often on great national traumas, of course, but at times the most memorable works — the ones that last past the generation that actually experienced the catastrophe — come along some years after the event. It’s as if painters and poets and filmmakers need time to let it all sink in, to let the meaning of a great national tragedy slowly push its way past the sentimental cliches and the creaking platitudes, like a patient commuter at a rusty turnstile.”

Everyone knows by now that today’s children are subjected to more advertising than any previous generation in human history, and furthermore, that a disturbing percentage of that advertising is aimed squarely at them. But despite frequent warnings by experts about the effect such a barrage of commercialism can have on kids, there has been little public effort to stop, or even scale back, the volume of ads dumped on the average child. Enter the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a “Boston-based coalition of parents, educators, health-care specialists, and advocacy groups” dedicated to wiping out youth-targeted advertising. A bit Quixotic? Maybe. But as the CCFC’s leader puts it: “Who won David vs. Goliath?”

We’ve all heard stories of those strange, obsessive types who attend the same play hundreds of times. This may not be normal behavior, but Rupert Christiansen says that there is great pleasure and intellectual growth to be derived from viewing the same work of theatre, art, or music more than once. “The point about the return visit is not the infantile pleasure of repetition, but the possibility of surprise. A good work of art never stays quite the same: it ambushes you, outwits you. A first exposure can provide the primitive excitement of wanting to know what happens next, a second provides the opportunity to register details, a third brings a sense of the underpinning joints and girders that make up the structure. And so it goes on.”

Critic Mark Morford spent the days during and after Hurricane Katrina at the infamous Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, filing reports that struck some of his readers as lacking in gravitas, given the events unfolding on the Gulf Coast. But as Morford points out, the world does not stop when a tragedy occurs, and leaving aside the fact that the Burning Man participants passed the hat and raised thousands for the relief effort, “in the wake of any national disaster or mounting death toll, it is exactly those things that celebrate life that we turn to offer salve and balm and resurrection of spirit. In other words, in the aftermath of hurricanes and national tragedies and in the face of the most ham-fisted and heartless and freedom-stabbing administration in recent American history, we need this sort of ‘trifling’ Burning Man fluff more than ever, to act as spark, as beacon, as counterbalance.”

It’s trial by fire time for 25 arts and culture organizations in Pittsburgh, as the city’s Allegheny Regional Asset District prepares to distribute some $78 million in funds. Rather than simply considering grant applications, the RAD board grills representatives of applying groups at a series of public meetings, then renders its decisions based on the board’s impressions of the stability of the applicants. This year, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, which recently dropped its live orchestra and is struggling to stay afloat, is on the hot seat, with the RAD board worrying that PBT is “draining its endowment to balance its budget.”