Category: issues

The UK National Lottery has funded some 53 arts centers at a cost of about half a billion pounds. “We’re witnessing an expansion of national arts facilities on a par with the nineteenth century, when local philanthropists and businessmen funded art galleries, theatres and concert halls across Britain. But the striking feature of today’s cultural institutions is that they don’t seem to be based on an artistic agenda.”

The Australia Council, the federal government’s main arts funding body, is being restructured. “On the chopping block are the council’s new media and community cultural development boards, which give grants respectively to artists working in new media, and with communities such as disadvantaged youth, prison inmates and the homeless. It is believed some of the operations of those boards will be handled elsewhere in the organisation. The restructure is the outcome of a six-month review of the council’s operations.”

Arts funding is looking up in South Florida. “Here in South Florida, the Miami-Dade County populace voted on Nov. 2 to spend nearly $553 million for arts and culture. That was just one of eight categories on a $2.9 billion bond issue, each of which passed ballot muster.”

America’s major entertainment unions and associations are taking a hard line on copyright infringement. “The question is not whether the technology is good or bad — it simply is. The question is how we create a model which allows consumers the widest access and choices while ensuring that individual artists can sustain a career and continue to create. It is easy to attack the ‘establishment’ and the litigation-based solutions they are employing to try and deal with piracy. What is harder is to reconcile the fact that free access has a direct link to loss of income for individual actors and recording artists which, in turn, can result in everything from the loss of health and retirement benefits to the inability to continue to support a family or pursue a chosen career. “

All these Christmas shows. Really. There are too many of them. And how can you see most of them in a busy season? So why not put them all on a rolling parade and let people sit in one place while their favorite festivities roll by. Let’s call it “Let’s Roll.” Tom Proehl, organizer of “Let’s Roll!” and managing director of the Guthrie Theater, said, “The aesthetic synergies and economies of scale will benefit both audiences and arts organizations alike. Instead of deciding which of the many holiday shows to see, patrons can get the best of the Twin Cities performing arts in one sitting.”

The new Connecticut uber-agency on culture and tourism needed a logo. So a design firm came up with an abstract logo meant to evoke the agency’s diverse mandate. Now there are big protests. “Instead of criticizing the art (“Have a conversation about art? Not me!”) they attacked the cost. “This thing cost $10,000!” Of course, focusing on the final price tag disregards that such designs can cost much more (Hartford Stage’s new logo went well above $10,000); that the fee included months of meetings with state committees; that this was a Connecticut designer with a world-class reputation giving a deep discount.

“Late last month, reports began to surface on foreign newswires that hard-liners in the Chinese government had banned public discussion of thinkers and scholars guilty of taking “arrogant” (read: independent) positions on political and social affairs. In mid-November, Beijing’s Publicity Department, which is responsible for “ideological control,” issued an order to prohibit state-run newspapers, magazines, and TV stations from creating lists of such persons.”

Buenos Aries had one of the world’s great cultural scenes in the 1960s and 70s, seemingly pointing to better times ahead. “But the world did not take the turn they were all expecting for it to take. The times that followed were hard and painful. Dreams were trashed by the world’s powerful. The following decades to this cultural impasse can be described as the entering into the system’s main flow of mass production and consumption.” Now there are signs that Buenos Aries is regaining its groove.

Lots of arts organizations negotiated new contracts with their musicians, dancers, and stagehands this year, and while the resulting documents usually make for fairly dull reading, there are a few notable contractual oddities scattered across the vast union landscape. The San Francisco Symphony notes that “the music of Ludwig van Beethoven need not be performed at Beethoven festivals.” Cleveland Orchestra musicians taller than 6’4″ are entitled to exit-row or bulkhead seating on tour flights. And dancers at the Houston Ballet Theater get a $47 bonus if they are required to simulate diving into a lake.

It’s been a rough few years for the arts in South Florida, but recent trends seem to be signaling that better times are ahead. The state legislature has begun “rebuilding arts appropriations stripped during last year’s cultural cleansing. Private and corporate philanthropy increased significantly this year… [and] the Miami-Dade County populace voted on Nov. 2 to spend nearly $553 million for arts and culture.”