Category: issues

Among artists and intellectuals onstage at last weekend’s New Yorker Festival, “questions were repeatedly raised about the political potential of art and the role of intellectuals to be socially responsible. There was an urgency to the question that reflected the reality of time and place, of a presidential election four weeks away and of the inescapable reminders of Sept. 11.” But the answers remained debatable.

The refurbishment of London’s Royal Festival Hall, which will begin with the hall’s closure next summer, is expected to create 181 so-called “redundant” positions, and fully one-third of the venue’s staff will likely be laid off. The staff will be increased again when the hall reopens in 2007.

It’s an election year in Australia, and as Prime Minister John Howard struggles to hold his Liberal government majority together, the arts have taken a back seat to more hot-button issues. And despite some serious problems in the country’s orchestral industry, and uncertainty surrounding the future of the National Portrait Gallery, neither the ruling Liberals nor the opposition Labour Party appear to have any new strategies for the arts. In fact, “the arts policies of the major parties appear to cancel each other out rather than break any new ground.”

As Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to consolidate power around himself, the country’s artists, authors, and journalists are becoming alarmed at what seems to be a return to Soviet-era censorship. Books are being confiscated by government agents, media outlets are almost completely under the thumb of the Kremlin, and authors are facing official harassment, even prosecution, for expressing controversial opinions.

“After nearly two years of debate over how to spend a $120 million gift from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly, Americans for the Arts has decided to spend a small slice of it to start a citizens’ movement for the arts. The organization’s officials are expected to announce today in Washington that they are creating the Americans for the Arts Action Fund, a membership group that will adopt the fundraising and lobbying tactics of the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters to build support for arts and arts education.” The program is expected to cost $1 million.

The days of mass marketing in the entertainment world seem to be swiftly drawing to a close. As new technologies give consumers an increasingly diverse array of options, niche marketing is the wave of the future, and marketing to the bland middle as a way of reaching everyone is no longer the most reliable route to profitability. “Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody.”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has long struggled to maintain fiscal solvency in the face of slack attendance and an underfunded endowment, but in recent years, BAM has begun a turnaround that will culminate this fall with the completion of an $8.6 million restoration. In addition, the academy has announced two major gifts totalling $30 million, which will double the size of its endowment. Still, the organization’s long-term success seems to be inextricably tied to the fortunes of Brooklyn as a whole.

“It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written ‘language’ of the ancient Egyptians. A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world’s greatest civilisations revealed – thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars. But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier – by an Arabic alchemist.”

A new study of arts journalism by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program finds that the arts are thriving in cities and towns across North America. But arts journalism is going in exactly the opposite direction, throttled by an increasingly profit-driven business model and the ever-shrinking ‘news hole.’ “Many art sections have become viewer guides, devoting the bulk of their efforts to calendars, the daily TV grid and tiny thumbnail reviews. At some dailies, criticism is vanishing.”

As part of Toronto’s ongoing downtown redevelopment, a new $200 million cultural center is being planned for the waterfront, and organizers hope that it will become the go-to place for Toronto’s history and heritage. But don’t you dare call it a museum – those are for stuffy people.