Category: issues

“Product placement is such a growing phenomenon that Nielsen, the ratings arbiter, has started keeping track of the extent of its growth. Here’s their distressing discovery. In the first three months of 2005, there were 12,867 instances of placement in the Top 10 prime-time programs on U.S. television.” Now theatres are getting in to the product placement game…

“Sea Forts, which is billed as a study of isolation, will cost £93,000 in lottery cash and taxpayers’ money and is the brainchild of Stephen Turner, a Kent-based artist who describes his work as being ‘concerned with aspects of time and the dialectics of transience and permanence’. He will spend six weeks living in one of a complex of observation towers built during the Second World War to provide early warning of German attacks on the Thames estuary, where he will communicate his thoughts about loneliness in an internet journal.”

“Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” topped a poll Friday to find the 100 songs, movies, TV shows and books that “changed the world” in the opinion of musicians, actors and industry experts.”

The Central American Free Trade Agreement included a big win for American lobbyists for tougher copyright laws. “You wouldn’t know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law. Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology.”

“While the Senate’s version of the bill, passed in June, increased the NEA’s budget by $5 million, bringing it to $126.3 million from $121.3 million, the House’s version was twice as generous, with an increase of $10 million setting the endowment’s funding at $131.3 million. In the end, the Senate-House conference committee agreed to raise the NEA budget by what the Senate had recommended, but not without applying additional cuts.”

“University of Chicago President Don Michael Randel’s decision, announced last week, to leave next July to become president of the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has import for more than scholars in Hyde Park. Randel will be heading the leading funder of the humanities among U.S. philanthropies. The humanities always have scratched for foundation support but usually could count on a handful of old reliables. According to a 2004 report by the Foundation Center and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, five foundations accounted for a quarter of the $335 million in grants to the humanities in 2002, the most current year for such data. Mellon was the leading provider that year, with $25.9 million in grants (representing about 12 percent of its total giving), as it was for much of the prior decade.”

Does Jude Kelly know what she’s got herself in for, running South Bank’s artistic offerings? “So anxious were the Board to get her initials on a contract that they have allowed her to carry on directing shows elsewhere, a license that will eat into her time at the desk. Still, look on the bright side: making plays will give her interactive access to the artists she needs to enliven the South Bank, and it will signal that the centre at last has a creative director who can do something more than sign off budgets and dine for England. It will be no small plus if she also feels a sneaking need to outshine Nick Hytner’s rampantly autonomous National across the Waterloo Bridge, giving the South Bank a novel will to win.”

Protests are mounting against a new Columbine-inspired video game slated to be released by the makers of the infamous “Grand Theft Auto” series. The game, titled “Bully,” features a high school student tormented by his peers, who takes his revenge with extreme violence, killing fellow students and teachers. The company, Rockstar Games, describes the game as “humorous,” and downplays the violent aspects, but the game’s October release is likely to cause old debates about the effects of video game violence to rage anew.

An investigation by the State of California of the Getty Trust is the latest bad news for one of the world’s richest institutions. “The Getty Trust, with an endowment of more than $5 billion, includes the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a research institute, a vast library, an art conservation program and a grant-making office. The trust has suffered a number of administrative, legal and public relations blows over the last year. A number of senior officers have left, and staff morale is said to be low.”

“More and more do arts organisations feel they have to demonstrate their financial rather than their artistic prowess as a means of obtaining funds to support their existence. Arts festivals big and small commission economic impact studies to trumpet their success in creating employment, raising local incomes and encouraging tourism; understanding their cultural impacts often seems to take second place. Yet something is missing.”