Category: issues

Cell phones have become such a nuisance at stage shows that they’ve spawned their own mini-art form – the pre-curtain anti-cell phone announcement… They’re often as amusing as the shopw itself.

“Culture is everything we don’t have to do. Eating is necessary, but cuisine is culture. Clothes must be worn, but couture is culture. Haircuts and Shakespeare and early Saxon burial poetry all pose some kind of unnecessary order, he said, that we accept because it stimulates our most distinctive faculty. Imagination is the only thing we’re really good at. What we’re doing [when we’re engaging with cultural objects] is exercising that part of our mind that makes it possible to imagine things being ordered differently, and most importantly, to imagine what’s in other people’s minds. . . . If something is possible in art, it’s thinkable in life.”

“Touring a work internationally can transform the artists, allow the work to evolve, build a profile, develop a larger audience, validate companies in the eyes of their home audience, recoup their investment, or just keep everyone employed.” But “touring can also be a killer, psychologically and financially.”

“The National Endowment for the Arts has scaled back a new initiative to send the best of American culture around the country and is starting with only a tour of visual arts. Earlier plans included dance and music components.” President Bush had asked Congress to approve $18 million for the “American Masterpieces” project, but legislators only appropriated $2 million, necessitating the cuts.

Politicians are in a bind when it comes to talking about the arts. “Say nothing about the arts, and you outrage influential metropolitan liberals and buffet socialists, whose cocktail-party cri de coeur is the under-funding of their cultural playgrounds. Say too much, and you force diehards in the shires to join with chavs and “neets” to protest at taxpayers’ money going to fancypants bollocks that ought to pay for itself.”

How would you fix government support for culture in the UK if you ran the government? Fifty arts luminaries make their cases…

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $61 million in grants. “Just over $40 million of that amount will fund 64 grants to state and regional partnerships. The state partnerships provide support for state arts agencies’ basic plans to address local priorities, as well as funding arts education and local Challenge America initiatives. The regional partnerships provide basic support for regional arts organizations’ plans and for regional touring initiatives.”

The Baltic Center for contemporary arts has had a rough few years, with two directors quitting in quick succession. This weekend the Baltic thought it had hired a new director, but then he turned down the job…

Canada’s ruling Liberal government is in trouble, hanging on to power by a thread and likely to be forced into new elections by year’s end. And while Prime Minister Paul Martin and company might have many residents of Canada’s largest city exasperated, Martin Knelman warns that an electoral victory for the Conservative party and its leader, Alberta’s Stephen Harper, would be a death knell for Toronto’s arts scene. “Alberta’s well-known resentment of Toronto’s presumed cultural superiority could find expression in a big chill for local arts funding.”

“China’s schoolchildren have long been taught that the ancient fortification is one of the only man-made structures that can be picked out from orbit. However, last year, China’s first man in space disappointed the nation when he said he had failed to spot it.” Now a new photograph from space confirms the Wall is visible.