Category: issues

The UK Arts Council strategy of taking care of major arts groups while cutting smaller ones “made the best of a bad job. But they have cut the people who can’t shout. They have cut community arts and young artists who might turn out to be tomorrow’s major artists. And it is really tragic to have cut back on Creative Partnerships, which is targeted at the most deprived young people.”

Government arts funding in the Uk is supposed to be flat over the next few years. But “companies including the Royal Opera, English National Opera, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company will get a 2.75% increase – the estimated inflation rate – in 2007-08 even though the council estimates that its own standstill funding means a real loss of £34m. The council said it rejected ‘equal misery for all’, and the consequence is double misery for some, particularly the 121 groups which lose all their money, and a further 54 which will face drastic cuts.”

Arts Council England intends to allocate £12 million extra for training for arts leaders. “Our artists and arts institutions have an international reputation for excellence. But we need to make sure the management and leadership of the companies matches it. That’s why we’re investing in skills to help correct this.”

If Australia’s museums, galleries, and theatre groups are thinking that the crisis currently threatening to envelop the nation’s symphony orchestras could never happen to them, they’d better think again, according to some arts leaders. The orchestral crisis came about because of “a lack of urgent government action in updating the way major arts companies are funded,” an issue which could potentially affect the entire arts industry.

England’s arts advocates need to do a better job of selling themselves to the government. “Politicians seem embarrassed to be associated with the arts. The ‘arm’s-length’ separating grants from government control has become very short indeed – ‘almost Venus de Milo length’, according to the new chairman of Arts Council England, Sir Christopher Frayling.”

Filmmaker Ken Burns gives the annual Nancy Hanks speech at the Kennedy Center. It was a fine speech, writes Phil Kennicott, but rather empty. He gave “what may be studied in years to come as an almost faultless rhetorical exercise in the dying language of Art, Greatness and Inspiration. Burns, the avatar of PBS, speaks beautifully about nothing, using a set of tropes and gentle fictions that, when placed together in almost any order (like refrigerator magnet poetry), seem to take you to Parnassus.”

What’s happened to plans for cultural institutions to take up residence at the site of the World Trade Center? “In the nine months since, those arts institutions have been under pressure to prove themselves all over again. And even as the development corporation in charge of rebuilding ground zero prepares to unveil a design in the next few weeks for a museum complex at the site, it is by no means certain who will occupy it.”

Singapore is building an arts infrastructure. That’s good, writes Audrey Wong. But what about art? What about the artists? She worries that more attention is going into building up a commercial structure for art than is being spent on developing artists and their work.

As the actions of the boards of several arts organizations in the Pacific Northwest have shown in recent months, arts boards have a lot of responsibility (and headaches). “I think there’s a belief that to be on a nonprofit arts board, you maybe just show up at some meetings a few times a year. The truth is, the “hand-to-mouth business” of nonprofit art is scary and dangerous, and takes a lot of care and coddling and attention.”

“While American Francophobia can seem transient, news oriented, associated with the political right and theatrical in character, French anti-Americanism – like a venerable Old World tradition – reaches far and deep. It is championed by both the left and right. And over its long evolutionary course, various scientific, philosophical, political, social and racial justifications have been offered. Its convictions are so fundamental that they are barely recognized, and they are spreading.”