Category: issues

What’s the arts funding outlook after recent US elections? “In a country divided on nearly everything else, funding for the arts is inching toward bipartisan support. That has some arts leaders feeling cautiously optimistic. Others in the art world wonder whether risky, boundary-pushing art is itself at risk.”

Why are people so dismissive of Wales? It’s almost a national sport. And yet, Wales is coming into its own culturally…

What does it take to have a thriving arts community? Well, money of course, but there’s a whole culture of support that distinguishes a city that works culturally. Take Cleveland, for example…

“[Kansas City] officials, in a dispute that affects other downtown developments, are at loggerheads with backers of the proposed performing arts center over the location of a promised garage. The clash has complicated the city’s effort to acquire land controlled by backers of the performing arts center for a $50 million ballroom planned for the Bartle Hall convention center, city officials say. And Kansas City Ballet officials say that until the flap is resolved, their plan to build a $25 million home on the east side of Wyandotte Street between 16th and 17th streets is on hold.”

Six Hartford-area arts groups have joined forces to offer a multi-genre season ticket package designed to allow younger residents uninterested in tradition season passes to a single organization to pick and choose among the arts offerings available in the city. “The $99 price tag is a significant discount over regular priced tickets, more than 50 percent for some events,” and purchasers can redeem the vouchers at the local symphony, opera house, museum, theater, or dance company.

Censorship rears its head in the UK. But what a crazy policy. “The insoluble problem for censors in free societies today is the impossibility of establishing codes of the harmful and offensive that will obtain across every race, minority and interest group. There are so many clashing boundaries. Caught between the rock of freedom of expression and the hard place of our respect for the sensibilities of minorities, every cut or ban he makes ends up looking illogical and faintly ridiculous.”

The culture wars are back, and censorship is already sending a chill throughout the country, writes Frank Rich. “Merely the threat that the F.C.C. might punish a TV station or a network is all that’s needed to push them onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, “moral values” style.”

An analysis of the recent American election from an arts advocacy position suggests that the arts will neither gain or lose in the next Congress. “At the federal level, arts policy will likely remain on its current course, with no major policy shifts anticipated that would negatively impact the arts within the administration or the new 109th Congress,” states an analysis — called ‘2004 Election Impact on the Arts’ — from the advocacy group’s Arts Action Fund.”

“Childhood has become a boundless new frontier in the arts, a terrain of seemingly infinite magnitude, emotional density and thematic complexity. Audiences may find themselves disoriented and unnerved, as the conventional views of innocence, precociousness and predatory corruption give way to deeper vistas of childhood experience and meaning. In complicated, challenging and sometimes confounding ways, children occupy an increasingly large share of our collective imagination.”

Pittsburgh is asking nonprofit corporations in the city to kick in $6 million towards its financial recovery efforts, and warning that groups refusing to participate could face political retribution down the line. Among the threats from city and state lawmakers are that non-participating nonprofits could have state grants withheld, or even face the loss of their nonprofit status, which allows them to operate tax-free.