“The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a Congressional Arts Caucus floor amendment to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by $10 million, while quashing two additional amendments that would have cut a total of $45 million from the federal arts budget.”
Category: issues
Teachout: Culture Blogs And The Quality Of Culture
Terry Teachout sees the rise of arts blogs as a profound cultural change. “Artblogs are barely more than three years old. It is far too soon to say which of their opposing tendencies, the atomizing or the embracing, will have a more profound effect on the wider culture they have already started to shape. It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcultures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate.”
Canadian Culture Increasingly Doesn’t Travel
“Canada’s export of cultural goods—such as art and music—has been steadily declining for the last four years. In 2004 it reached its lowest point since 1997, according to the Statscan report. The trade deficit in culture goods is due to a decline in exports—particularly to the US—and is most pronounced in the sector of written and published works such as books, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed materials.”
Canadians Cash Out On Culture
Canadians are spending more and more on culture. A new government report say that “consumer spending on cultural goods and services grew 36 per cent from 1997 to 2003. Over the same period, the Consumer Price Index, which gauges all spending, increased 14 per cent. The 2003 amount, pegged at $22.8 billion, was more than Canadians spent on alcohol, tobacco and gambling ($20.8 billion) or RRSP contributions ($16.3 billion). Consumer spending on culture was more than triple government contributions to culture nationwide, which topped out at $7.4 billion.”
The NEA Visits Congress
Will the National Endowment for the Arts get a funding boost? There are recommendations for an increase. But still, some legislators balk at the idea of government support for the arts…
A Culture Of Critical Decline
Critics have declining influence? “It is dangerous to be defensive — there’s no question that the critics’ lot has changed for good. Critics now have less power. To the degree that flows from the marginalization of serious cultural inquiry — and it surely does — that fact is to be mourned and fought back against. But to the degree it flows from the empowerment of the audience, reader or listener, it is to be cheered.”
Some Critics And Some Critical Traction
What did America’s critics hope to accomplish by getting together and talking last week? Dominic Papatola: “Will my fellow critics and I reach any grand conclusions here in La-La Land? Perhaps not. Maybe the best we can do is reassure ourselves that, in a world of increasingly slippery standards, we can help to give culture some traction. And then go back home and fight the good fight.”
With 400 Critics In A Room…
So what was the scene in Los Angeles at last week’s first-ever joint gathering of five of America’s critics’ associations? “Gather 400 of them and, depending upon the moment you step in, the scene might resemble a learned symposium, a stampede of cats with sharp claws, or a support group for the underpaid and overeducated.”
Critical Democracy
Is critics’ inluence declining? Who cares? “Just as we don’t need bigger, more powerful and intrusive government, neither do we need fewer, more powerful critics. Today’s profusion of self-appointed critics, publishing via blogs and Podcasts and e-mail lists, is a great thing indeed, bringing the truest form of democracy to the once rarified world of arts criticism. Instead of having to work their way through the academic and corporate-media gauntlet, the best critics simply need to say their piece. If it’s solid, it will eventually rise to the top n just as the best art has done, for millennia. And if this means that there eventually won’t be any jobs left for paid, professional critics, so be it.”
Chicago Says “Snap Away!”
Chicago city officials have decided to relax permit rules for those taking pictures in Millennium Park. Security guards had been chasing away photographers who tried to take pictures of the hugely popular giant Anish Kapoor “Bean” sculpture. “Permits were initially priced at $350 a day for professional still photographers, $1,200 a day for professional videographers and $50 an hour for wedding photographers.”