Category: issues

“The 1950s have an image problem. Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe are now the decade’s most famous faces: a pair of troubled celebrities who abused drugs and died young. Visual shorthand for the decade is always the same: black-and-white clips of row after row of cloned houses in Levittown, or gaudy tailfins on cars, or H-bomb clouds mushrooming over Bikini Island.” But maybe this is all wrong. Brian Murray contends that “the literary 1950s were a “third flowering of American talent.” In fact, American literature of the 1950s “now asserts special claims to greatness,” drawing energy from a decade that was far from being “smug and absorbed with its own splendors.”

With 154 federal agencies in line for budget cuts in George Bush’s proposed new budget, the arts did pretty well, as Bush held funding steady…

Fundraisers are a fact of business for most non-profits. But some of the lavish events suck up much of the money they raise. So what should a fundraiser cost?

Where is the trauma in anything having to do with the naked human form, asks Susan Paynter. “In a culture that glorifies violence, why are human penises, bums and breasts so threatening? Why did the foundations of American civilization quake when, for 1.5 seconds, Janet Jackson’s partially nude breast popped out at last year’s Super Bowl?”

The stakes in the copyright wars are escalating. “With the Supreme Court scheduled next month to hear a pivotal case pitting copyright holders (represented by MGM Studios) against the makers of file-sharing software (Grokster and StreamCast Networks), some participants are putting their message machines into high gear. But winning hearts and minds – of teenagers, consumers and lawmakers – has never been a simple matter.”

“It would be nice if everyone agreed that somebody who creates a speech, composes a piece of music or writes a book has the right not to be ripped off. But it’s not that simple. Every work of art builds on what has gone before, using ideas and images that entered the public domain long ago. David Bollier argues that those who plunder it and lock up the loot with copyrights and trademarks are robbing humanity of its ability to create new works of art. What’s worse, many corporations copyright things they obviously oughtn’t, simply because they can get away with it. Who can afford to fight armies of well-paid corporate lawyers? Not the impoverished poet in a garret who borrows a small image from, say, a popular song and transforms it into a huge new one.”

“First there was the speed bump; now it’s the bench barrier. The former is designed to slow traffic, the latter to stop skateboarders, BMXers, in-liners — and anyone else who would do more than sit upright in the public spaces of downtown Toronto. Although this architecture of exclusion can be hard to notice, much of the civic realm is being quietly altered to eliminate the menace of kids on wheels and, even worse, the homeless, and all those who would use benches, window sills or walls for other than their intended purposes.”

“Joseph Deutch, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, was the last student to perform a final project in a seminar taught by the performance artist Ron Athey on Nov. 29. According to witnesses, Mr. Deutch, wearing a coat and tie, pulled what appeared to be a handgun from a paper bag, loaded it with a single bullet, spun the cylinder, aimed the pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. When the gun failed to discharge, he left the room and, seconds later, the seminar members heard the sound of a shot.” So is Deutch a dangerous individual with suicidal impulses, or can a game of Russian Roulette really be legitimately construed as art? Believe it or not, there is some precedent for this…

A proposed expansion of Dallas’s Arts District got a big boost this week when a developer who had been balking at the zoning changes required for the expansion changed course and signed on as a supporter of the plan. “Despite vocal opposition from at least three property owners, City Plan Commission members on Thursday unanimously voted to lengthen the district.” The Arts District has become one of downtown Dallas’s most desirably urban areas, and the expansion is designed in part to force the owners of some of the dilapidated gas stations and vacant lots on the area’s outskirts to conform to the new high standard set by the district.

” The key witness in the tax fraud case against philanthropist Herbert Axelrod pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge yesterday as part of a plea bargain with federal prosecutors. Gary Hersch, a former employee of Axelrod, admitted in federal court in Trenton that he conspired to defraud the Internal Revenue Service by hiding $775,000 in a Swiss bank account… Axelrod gained notoriety after he sold a collection of rare stringed instruments to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in 2003 for a fraction of what he said they were worth. That sale came under the scrutiny of federal authorities because of allegations that Axelrod had inflated the instruments’ value as part of a tax scheme.”