Category: issues

A new study indicates that residents of San Antonio enjoy art and cultural events, but are increasingly frustrated with the lack of financial support given to the organizations that make up the city’s cultural scene. More than two-thirds of residents even support a $5-per-capita hike in the amount the city spends on the arts, which is significant when you consider how Texans normally feel about tax increases. But San Antonio’s real cultural problem has never been the public sector, but private donors and foundations who either don’t give nearly as much as their counterparts in other cities, or who give without any real understanding of where their money is going.

“At a time when many cities are basing their long-term hope on exploiting their traditional dominance in arts-related industries, the suburbs are beginning to provide some serious competition for both patrons and donors. This evolution has its roots in basic demography and economic trends. Since 1960, more than 90% of all population growth in America’s metropolitan areas has taken place in suburbia. Today roughly two out of three people in large metropolitan areas live in the suburbs.”

So some Seattle arts groups find themselves financially imperiled. Again. Who says, asks Roger Downey, that failing arts groups ought to be bailed out just because they’re arts groups? “Even individual artists are expected to live by the economic rules that govern all the rest of us. Somehow only arts organizations are allowed to claim immunity from the laws of financial gravity; for them, there’s no connection between supply and demand, balanced budgets are for profiteers and sissies, and water runs uphill when we tell it to.”

Upstate New York’s embattled Saratoga Performing Arts Center has chosen a well-connected state Senate aid to replace longtime President Herb Chesbrough, who is leaving under a cloud after a scathing report took the center to task for its shoddy management practices. Marcia White, who will earn less than half the annual salary that Chesbrough enjoyed as president, will take over the running of SPAC in March, and plans to spend her first few months developing a new business plan for the center.

In the past 20 year the number of arts organizations in Texas has increased by 400 percent. In the same period, public funding for the arts has actually decreased by 4 percent. How to do so much more with less?

Members of Charlotte’s city government propose spending $130 million on new arts facilities. “Supporters of the plan — which was unveiled at Monday’s City Council meeting — say it would mark a dramatic shift in public funding for the arts, with an emphasis on building venues and a drastic reduction for the various arts groups in subsidies for operating expenses such as utilities, janitorial services and minor maintenance.”

The architecture world has been profoundly generous in its response to the Asian tsunami disaster, sending large donations and offering expertise in rebuilding a good-sized chunk of several countries. But all the good will in the world doesn’t make the decision-making regarding reconstruction any easier, and many in Asia are worried that governments will approve the construction of a large number of concrete and prefab housing units just to appear to be doing something. Those on the ground say that what is really needed is “architectural acupuncture, knowing what to do where, marrying local traditions with global expertise.”

As U.S. copyright rules have tilted ever more strictly towards the original holders, artists and filmmakers who created work under far different regulations are increasingly finding themselves out in the cold. As the limited permissions documentary filmmakers negotiated with copyright holders of news footage expire, older documentaries such as the award-winning Eyes on the Prize are having to be pulled from circulation completely.

The managing director of the London Philharmonia is sounding the alarm about what he views as an unstoppable erosion of British high culture under the juggernaut of commercially-driven pop. “Thanks to a relentless diet of pop and dance music, television theme tunes and a growing cultural ignorance, most of his potential audience only hears classical music at the cinema. If it were not for foreign visitors and tourists, he claims, most classical concerts in Britain would be played to almost empty halls.”

Cleveland arts groups have been ratcheting up efforts to improve the city’s cultural scene, but many have discovered that joining forces can be the most effective way to compete in a world with seemingly endless entertainment options. “So why aren’t the creators of two significant new Cleveland arts festivals working together?” The Cleveland Play House is planning a theater and arts festival for May 2006, but the creators of a Labor Day arts-and-technology festival will beat them to the punch by nine months. So why not let two become one? Well, for one thing, the Play House’s artistic director thinks that Labor Day weekend is “box office poison.”