Category: issues

Dallas’s $275 million performing arts center is being designed and built by star architects Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster. But trying to get the two to work together has been difficult. And the arts groups that will call the center home have little access to the two or their representatives. “This pattern has produced frustration among performing arts center staff and some members of the building committees, who complain privately about lack of coordination and their once-a-month access to the decision-makers.”

Blogging has taken off in Iran, and Persian is now the fourth most popular blog language in the world. “A major factor in the widespread adoption of blogging in Iran has been the Unicode standard, which has made it possible for people to write and publish easily in the Persian script. Nor does it hurt that it is easy to set up a blog — or to use a pseudonym. The result has been the creation of a medium that cuts across social and geographic boundaries.”

It’s not enough to just have reviews of culture these days. Now we have reviews of those reviews. “The traditional objects of culture – books, movies, art – are becoming ever more distant. In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists.”

For more than three decades, Ireland has encouraged artists by providing “tax-free status on income from original works considered to be of creative, artistic or cultural merit. To qualify, a sample or copy of work must be submitted to the Revenue Commissioners. The scheme costs an estimated €35 million a year in lost taxation revenue.” Now a list of artists benefiting from the plan has been published under the Freedom of Information Act, and it includes “the names of most authors, artists and musicians who came to prominence in the late 1990s.” As least one political party says high-earning artists should start paying tax.

Kansas-based preacher Fred Phelps, an ultra-right-wing activist best known for parading with his followers at the funerals of victims of AIDS and gay bashings while shouting through a megaphone and waving signs reading “God Hates Fags,” is taking on a Colorado Springs arts center that has accepted funding from a gay/lesbian action group. The reverend’s merry band says that the arts center has signed on to promote “the radical homosexual agenda” by accepting the money. The reality of the situation, unsurprisingly, bears little resemblance to the Phelps interpretation, but that isn’t deterring protest organizers in their crusade to wipe out the “sodomite juggernaut” that is apparently running rampant in Colorado Springs.

The Edinburgh Festival had a rotten year at the box office last year. “The Festival’s financial statement for the year ended 31 October, 2004, which has been released to The Scotsman, shows that income from ticket sales fell from £2,237,000 in 2003 to £1,745,000 last year, a fall of almost £500,000. The Festival also faced losses at the Hub, its main centre which it owns and operates, of £120,000. The EIF had to ask for an emergency funding bail-out earlier this year and its financial position is now top of the agenda for the annual meeting to be held at the end of this month.”

A new arts-and-technology festival in Cleveland is attracting serious donors, despite an overall malaise in the local cultural scene. Ingenuity, as the fest will be called, has in recent weeks picked up $100,000 from the George Gund Foundation, as well as $60,000 from governmental sources (with another $150,000 in county funds still on the table) and a $20,000 challenge grant from Case Western Reserve University. The festival, which kicks off in September 2005, is expected to cost $1.4 million.

“Nearly 3 million people — representing 2.2% of all jobs in the United States — work in the arts, according to a new survey by Americans for the Arts, released to coincide with Arts Advocacy Day on March 15 in Washington, D.C. The report states that arts companies, organizations, and related businesses now exist in all 435 Congressional districts, lending credence to the position maintained by many arts advocates that the economic power of America’s “creative industries” should not be underestimated.”

A group of influential British members of Parliament has condemned the government’s freeze in arts funding. “The government needs to re-evaluate its allocation of resources to the arts taking a long-term view, to ensure that real terms cuts are avoided where no compelling arguments or evidence are presented for their necessity. In our view no such arguments have been made. The government should reconsider and find the £34m needed to keep the Arts Council funding in line with inflation.”

The Canadian province of Newfoundland is adding eight million new dollars to its culture budget and promises millions more over the next two years. “The good news for arts and culture follows a year in which jobs were slashed and projects put on hold because of government belt-tightening.”