Category: issues

The question isn’t as preposterous as it might sound. “Because the FCC has become so politicized and beholden to big business, it has ceased to be protector of the airwaves, which are supposed to belong to the citizens of this country (but most believe they belong to big business)… [Furthermore], there is simply no reason for the FCC to regulate broadcast content. By doing so, it is acting as a censor board. If it were really interested in protecting the public, the FCC would take on the issue of violence on TV, which it doesn’t consider indecent, instead of getting worked up over a tit and profanity.”

This was the first year in Boston for the touring Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and now that the holiday dust has cleared, local arts groups are reporting that everyone’s fears about the touring Rockettes were entirely justified. “Business was down at the Boston Pops, Handel and Haydn Society, Revels, and Boston Ballet… The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the corporate entity that oversees the Pops, canceled three Holiday Pops concerts because of slow ticket sales,” and the ballet, which was booted from its traditional home to make way for Radio City, reported disappointing ticket sales for its revamped and Nutcracker. Meanwhile, the Rockettes sold 200,000 in less than a month.

“The Boyd Theatre, Philadelphia’s last movie palace, is to be saved under a deal that will allow Clear Channel to stage concerts, musicals and Broadway-sized productions there, [the city’s mayor] is to announce today… Clear Channel emerged in the fall of 2003 as the angel that would help Goldenberg rescue the once-grand art-deco theater.”

Hong Kong proposes to build a gigantic arts complex that includes “four giant museums, four large concert halls and theaters, a school for the arts and more.” Designs for the project have already been commissioned from Norman Foster. “But the project has become the center of a bitter debate in the last few weeks. Artists here are deeply split on the idea, and a street demonstration on Christmas Day drew hundreds of protesters.”

Steve Winn ponders endings: “Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what’s come before — in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It’s a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off.”

“Students with high levels of arts participation outperform “arts-poor” students in virtually every important measure. We only recently have begun to document the impact of the arts on teaching and learning. But re search has linked arts-based education to the development of basic cognitive skills, skills used to master other subjects such as reading, writing and mathematics.”

“Religion as faith and as an explanation of the world – why God exists, what happens after we die, who gets to heaven (or hell): most of us would run a mile from such a conversation. We know that argument was won a long time ago and there is no point discussing it. Real believers (as opposed to the soppy “there-must-be-something else” brigade) are infrequently encountered and are not in any case amenable to what we believe is reason. They have their private beliefs; let them get on with them.”

Chicago’s new Millennium Park is a hit with critics and the public. “In many minds, the vibrant new downtown park represents a spectacular and vital transformation of a city’s core, and a populist tide that, especially given all the rhapsodic national press that has flowed its way, cannot help but raise all local cultural boats. But there’s a downside. The construction of Millennium Park ate up a whopping $200 million in local arts philanthropic dollars. And it’s seeking still more donated money in 2005 to fully establish its ongoing conservancy. Some are starting to suggest that the local moneybags are in danger of being tapped out.”

Ireland is going to review its tax policy that allows artists to not pay any taxes. The review is in response to widespread public anger that “millionaires in the music business and other fields have been using relief schemes that allow them, legitimately, to avoid paying any tax on their earnings. The tax free scheme for writers, artists and musicians was introduced more than 30 years ago by former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, an arts patron who was then finance minister. The scheme, unique to Ireland, was intended to show how the country valued artistic and creative talent, as well as being of practical help to struggling artists.”

John Elliot is getting attention for his direct marketing analysis of arts audiences and how likely they are to buy tickets for a given show. He has “detailed computer analysis of consumers’ purchasing patterns and statistical models to track down the most likely ticket buyers for cultural district shows. His secret weapon? A database of 425,000 households based on 14 years’ worth of ticket sales.”