Category: issues

For many arts groups, the tech bubble of the late 1990s was a boon unlike any other in recent history, a time when businesspeople were rolling in cash and eager to dole it out to needy nonprofits. But in San Francisco, one of the centers of the dot-com boom, the arts were nearly drowned by the concomitant tidal wave of rising real estate prices. “The real estate crunch may have eased when the boom went bust, but now the focus has shifted to battling even more aggressively for financial support, as public and private funding dried up.” The crisis gave new direction to the Bay Area group known as Intersection for the Arts, which has been connecting artists, performers and audiences in an attempt to promote a citywide sense of community ownership of the arts.

The U.S. House of Representatives has blocked a controversial provision of the infamous Patriot Act, saying that it impinges on the privacy rights of individuals. The provision allows federal investigators access to library and bookstore records in order to track the reading habits of Americans suspected of wrongdoing. The American Civil Liberties Union is celebrating the 238-to-187 vote striking down the provision. President Bush is most decidedly not.

Most politicians are not what you’d call on the cutting edge of new technology, and in the past few years, that has meant that most Congressional attempts to deal with the controversies surrounding new media, fair use, and copyright law have wound up being criticized as anti-consumer. The main problem seems to be that Congress doesn’t really understand the issues involved. But there are exceptions, and Congressman Rick Boucher is Exhibit A. “While other lawmakers have long-standing relationships with the entertainment industry, whose chief concern is piracy, Boucher sees his pro-technology policies as a way to further education, communication and job creation. Boucher, a Democrat representing the rural 9th District of Virginia, has introduced a bill to restore some of the fair-use rights taken away by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

It was last November when first-year grad student Joseph Deutch pulled out a gun in his UCLA performance art class and proceeded to play Russian Roulette in front of his horrified classmates and professor. Since then, two tenured professors have resigned in protest of the university’s failure to immediately suspend Deutch, calling his actions “domestic terrorism,” and a full investigation has been completed by the school. But Deutch remains enrolled at UCLA, and the dean of students says that there are no plans to expel him.

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unceremoniously dumped a long-running music series it had hosted for nearly two decades this spring, museum officials explained that the move was part of a decision to focus on LACMA’s core mission of bringing art to the public. Mark Swed is skeptical of this line of thinking: “Money doesn’t seem to be the overriding concern. The museum’s music programming has always been done on the cheap. Many of the series have underwriting… Never have the arts been more suited to interaction than they are now. And never before have art museums been better equipped to be laboratories for such chemical combustion.

The city of Roanoke, Virginia, is attempting to raise $46 million to build a museum designed by Randall Stout, and the project has the town buzzing. But are high art and small cities in the Blue Ridge Mountains really meant for each other? “The danger is that outsiders will embrace it, but we – the natives – won’t.” In fact, it all sounds suspiciously like this one episode of The Simpsons…

“Archaeologists have discovered Europe’s oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids. More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC.”

“Blame it on Pablo Picasso. Anyone who took a college arts course knows that modernism began in 1907 with his painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Implicit in modernism, as seen in Picasso’s use of flat perspective, non-Western art and the deconstruction of the human body, was a critique of art itself. From the death of art to the death of art criticism is a step that, amazingly, has taken a full century. The Internet is but the latest manifestation of modernism. And it follows that if in art anything goes — as opposed to the Academism that modernism rejected — the same is true for criticism. Everybody’s a critic. Blog it.”

A year ago there was much excitement in Richmond, VA, as a campaign to build a new $168 million performing arts center kicked into gear. But the project has bogged down and “what so many had hoped would become Richmond’s saving grace — a grand music hall that would complete a renaissance on East Broad Street — has been derailed. For the arts center, the going won’t get easier anytime soon. If fund-raising was already difficult in part because of negative publicity, as the foundation asserts, it promises to get worse as Wilder continues his assault on the business community, making the performing arts center his personal punching bag of taxpayer waste.

Two years ago New Jersey passed a dedicated hotel-motel tax to provide stable funding for arts and culture. Arts supporters rejoiced. But the amount the tax has collected has fallen far short of predictions and “although funding for the arts council is at an all-time high, overall cultural funding is down because the tax does not fully fund the cultural trust, a public-private endowment started in 2000.”