Category: issues

Sydney, Australia, is a world-class city in every sense of the word, but now comes evidence that one of those senses may be hurting another. “With the cost of living soaring like some interminable aria, Sydney risks losing its artistic core. Is Sydney becoming a town that discards culture in favour of superficiality and materialism?” The answer is, of course, far more complicated than the question, but there does seem to be a measurable danger to the city’s cultural life.

The UK is signing on to a half-century old provision from the Hague convention’s rules of war which allows for the protection of cultural treasures from marauding armies. British politicians had always dismissed the guidelines, which call for labeling specific works of great cultural or artistic significance with a blue shield, but reconsidered after the 2003 looting of Baghdad’s museum in the wake of the American invasion. Now the government is launching a consultation process to determine the works of art that should be selected for the special treatment.

More and more performing arts centers are adding fees to ticket purchase. In the Jersey: “As the state’s arts centers prepare to launch their 2005-06 seasons this month, they are quietly upping the service fees on ticket purchases to pump up their bottom lines. Whether it’s a per ticket surcharge, a facility fee or a total order ‘processing fee,’ the real cost for a ticket can be 10 percent more than advertised.”

“For a city of only half a million people, New Orleans looms as large in our cultural imagination as L.A. or Chicago. Playwrights, novelists, poets, film directors, painters, chefs, dive-bar raconteurs and especially musicians all have drunk deeply of the city’s heady brew of flamboyance and decadence, joie de vivre and fatalism, the sexy and the sinister.”

Compiled as of Sunday…

“The need for reliable data, trusted publications, and a familiar meeting place for the arts industries has never been greater. The arts, both high and popular, are being fundamentally reshaped by economic and technological forces that originate outside the field and are largely unknown or misunderstood. The established mechanisms for supporting, producing, distributing, validating and connecting art with a public are mutating rapidly or simply turning obsolete. Meanwhile, surprisingly little collaboration exists within the world of the arts or across disciplines, borders, and oceans to come to terms with this emerging environment.”

“The state of many cultural institutions in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi are largely unknown, those preparing to help say. The Heritage Emergency National Task Force – a coalition of 36 federal agencies and national organizations – held a conference call yesterday to plan for help, said Jane Long, task force director. It is a project of Heritage Preservation, a national nonprofit, in Washington. The main problem, she said, is the lack of information, particularly about New Orleans.”

Membership in the recently propsed Academy of Scotland would include an artist voted in each year by the public. Scottish Culture Minister Patricia Ferguson: “I really want to get people involved in the process. There is an idea of making a People’s Award, with one living artist a year being voted into the academy by the public. It would be a way of involving people in the arts directly – and people do like expressing their opinion.”

Edinburgh’s festivals have had a great summer with ticket sales up substantially. “The Edinburgh Fringe sold a record 1,335,000 tickets, up 82,000 or 7 per cent, on last year, the Fringe Society said. The total value of the tickets sold was about £11,640,000, also up by at least the same margin. The Edinburgh International Festival, with a week still to run, said yesterday its ticket takings were up 13 per cent on this time last year. The Edinburgh International Film Festival reported an increase of 12 per cent.”

Next year Brian McMaster, the longest-serving director of the Edinburgh Festival, is stepping down. “The hunt for a new boss has started a bit late. The Festival Council’s search party – chaired by Edinburgh’s Lord Provost and made up of eight people whose experience and credentials on the international cutting edge of artistic trends seems worryingly minimal – must be losing sleep over the timetable. An appointment made next May with the successful candidate taking up the post less than a year ahead of his or her first festival isn’t going to secure those prize artists with diaries filled five years ahead. And the unthinking choice of an internal appointment or of any inadequately experienced local hopefuls isn’t the solution.”