Category: issues

Interlochen Center for the Arts, the northern Michigan-based arts academy which runs a full-time arts high school as well as a massive summer camp program, has made some big cuts to its summer offerings. 37 faculty members received notification this week that they would not be brought back in 2005, and the summer camp will be shortened from eight weeks to six. Interlochen administrators say that the cuts were necessary to insure financial stability and allow for basdly-needed raises for the remaining faculty. The summer program had 247 instructors and more than 2000 students this past summer.

AJ Blogger Drew McManus, an alumnus of Interlochen, has a number of questions about this week’s cuts, and is curious about the creation of 18 new positions for “teaching assistants,” who will presumably be paid considerably less than the more experienced full-time faculty. “These assistants report directly to the newly created area coordinators, the same people responsible for evaluating and recommending the faculty members who were on the current ‘massacre’ list… I don’t know how enthusiastic I would be to send my son or daughter off to camp if part of their instruction is not going to come directly from resident faculty members.”

Nothing strikes terror into the hearts of planners of local holiday shows like the news that the Rockettes are coming to town. The touring version of the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular has been a mass-marketing juggernaut in many cities, severely cutting into ticket sales for local productions of The Nutcracker and other holiday favorites. But in Denver, where the Radio City show is debuting this year, “the show’s ubiquitous advertising and numerous public appearances have brought earlier and increased awareness to all consumers of their impending holiday entertainment choices. And early returns indicate everyone seems to have benefited.”

Chicago artists have long complained that the city’s public art program is unnecessarily secretive and unresponsive to public concerns. A corporate lawyer named Scott Hodes has been fighting to get the program’s inner workings open to scrutiny for years, and now, he appears to have won. Among other accusations of impropriety, Hodes “alleged that $20,600 in program funds were improperly channeled to artists and apprentices through a charity directed by [Chicago’s First Lady Maggie] Daley.” The city, which has always maintained that the program operates completely above board, has now agreed to meet with Hodes and, presumably, to satisfy his demands for a more transparent process.

Arts groups may have a tough time prying much money out of the government these days, but 2004 has been a record year for private giving, with enormous single gifts dominating the philanthropic landscape. The biggest donors of the year were Bill & Melinda Gates, who pumped a whopping $3 billion into their own foundation, and while most of the truly outsized gifts went to universities and foundations, arts groups got their share of the largesse as well.

The culture wars are heating up again, and it’s depressing to think we’ll be refighting battles of the 80s (shouldn’t that be 50’s? or 1850s…?) “The danger of the return of the culture war is not only the damage that the right will inflict, but also artists’ responses. I dread a new round of right-wing-baiting art and its cycle of abuse. Art lobs a spit ball and the firestorm of outrage arrives right on schedule, followed by lame dodges.”

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which last summer tried to end a longstanding summer residency by New York City Ballet, has been cited for bad management by an audit of the organization. “Over the last few years, the Saratoga arts center has struggled with an annual deficit of $400,000 to $500,000 on an operating budget of $13 million and been forced to dip into its $7 million endowment to cover operating expenses.”

“The US Senate passed a scaled-back version of a controversial copyright bill Saturday, keeping a provision that imposes severe penalties on people caught with camcorders in movie theaters but scrapping other provisions that copyright-reform activists had criticized.”

Which American arts organizations raised the most money from private donors last year? Carnegie Hall came first, bringing in $82.7, and the Met Opera was second with $68.6 million. But No. 7 was the Nashville Symphony?

Artists worked in Iraq during the Saddam years, but the art being made in Iraq now is different. “Artists are emerging from the atrophied, censorious Saddam years, from the distortions of taste provoked by state patronage and control and the horizons foreshortened by sanctions, and are beginning to document what is around them.”