Category: issues

An initiative in Scotland aims to bring the arts to people who don’t have access to them. “The £1.4 million Partners project will see a host of accomplished artists open up residencies in areas with little experience of the arts and invite local people to participate. The project’s aim is to inject both a creative and economic boost to the communities involved. Residencies will be established to enrich students, disabled people and other members of the general public. People can choose from a wide array of the arts, including writing, web design, dance, photography, electronic music – even circus skills.”

There are plenty of grant-awarding foundations out there, but Louise Blouin didn’t see enough of them encouraging real creativity through their grants, so the 46-year-old Canadian native decided that the time was right to start her own foundation. In addition to handing out individual grants, “one of the foundation’s early projects will be to study the economic importance of the arts. It plans to hold forums at which artists, politicians, business leaders and educators propose cultural policies. The foundation also wants to endow a chair at a leading university to research the relevance of art to everyday life and the connections between the study of art and the study of perception and cognition.”

Actor Sean Connery has struck out at Scotland’s cultural policy and its culture minister. He “bitterly complains that the nation has had six culture ministers since devolution but there is little progress in developing the arts.”

Author James Reston is considering legal action against director Ridley Scott and movie studio 20th Century Fox after concluding that Scott’s latest epic, Kingdom of Heaven, is based directly on Reston’s 2001 book, Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. The book was pitched to Scott as a film idea in late 2001, but Scott turned it down, and claims never to have read the book.

UK composer Peter Maxwell Davies recently made waves when he accused television’s addiction to pop culture of being one of the root causes of the decline of classical music. But the arbitrary setting of “cultural standards” like these drive some in the arts sphere up the wall. “There is as much rubbish passed off as a serious creative endeavour in high art as ever disgraces a TV screen… I like John Keats as much as I like Bob Dylan. I’m fond of cheap Hollywood movies and Matisse – is this allowed? – simultaneously. I can discuss any sept of the Marx clan, from Groucho to Karlo, you care to mention. In a few small areas of art and ideas I am almost, but never quite, an expert. I am also a disgrace, culturally speaking, and proud of it.”

Camden, New Jersey is a struggling city, plagued by poverty and violence and haunted by comparisons to thriving Phialdelphia, just across the Delaware River. Back in 1996, the state subsidized the construction of a major performing arts center inside Camden’s massive Clear Channel-owned Tweeter Center. But while the for-profit arm of the Tweeter has thrived, the non-profit arts center has been a dismal failure, and some are questioning the massive taxpayer subsidies that continue to be pumped into the project.

When most people think of New York, they’re really thinking of Manhattan, and that’s fine, since Manhattan is all exciting and trendy and stuff, but the fact is that there’s another borough of America’s largest metropolis that deserves equal attention, especially from those interested in the arts and culture. Yeah, it’s Brooklyn. Yous gadda problem wid dat?

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And what Minneapolis has right now is cultural palaces, a whole raft of them, designed by some of the world’s leading architects. With about $500 million worth of museums, libraries and theaters nearing completion, the city’s arts groups are banding together to launch a national marketing campaign promoting the Minneapolis ‘arts explosion’… [Already,] European tour directors are adding Minneapolis to their itineraries, and architecture schools nationwide are making plans for their students to visit the city and its new buildings.”

Clear Channel – the radio and entertainment giant, is spinning off its concert business. “Clear Channel said the IPO of the outdoor advertising unit and spinoff of the entertainment unit will result in greater financial muscle for future acquisitions, because the separately listed stocks will provide clear valuations of the two businesses. The company also said that the spinoff of the entertainment unit will allow it to operate as a largely unregulated public company, as opposed to the company’s heavily regulated radio business.”

The announcement that the New York Public Library is selling off art to finance an endowment is a disgrace. “These are bad times for high culture at the cash register. Seats aren’t being filled, turnstiles aren’t whirling. Cultural institutions are having to scramble. That this is happening at a moment when there’s more wealth around than at any time, in any one single place, in history suggests that a tipping point has been reached, that the dumbing-down epitomized by the Styles section of The Times, or the failure of our great universities to educate, or what works and what doesn’t on Broadway or at your local multiplex, has finally achieved implosive velocity. It suggests that there’s more to what’s happening than a simple post-9/11 fall-off in tourism, that some kind of sea change is in the works.”