Category: issues

“The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of several major philanthropies to take heat this year over high-end travel by board members, said it will no longer pay for first-class flights by its directors or most trips by their spouses.” Directors will now fly business class or coach, depending on the length of the flight. Recent media reports had questioned the use of foundation funds to pay for first-class travel.

“Valuable resources are being lost to students, researchers and historians because of sweeping changes in copyright law, according to digital archivists who are suing the government. These resources — older books, films and music — are often out of print and considered no longer commercially viable, but are still locked up under copyright. Locating copyright owners is a formidable challenge because Congress no longer requires that owners register or renew their copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office.” The plaintiffs in the lawsuit want the right to create a digital archive of such “orphan works” for public use.

Tech companies and consumer groups are trying to persuade the U.S. Congress to hold public hearings before it adopts the so-called Induce Act, which would hold companies that manufacture file-trading software liable for the illegal actions of its users. The issue of secondary liability is far more complicated than many of the bill’s sponsors seem to realize, but Congress’s desire to pass some sort of serious copyright reform quickly may trump the need for further debate.

The California Center for the Arts, in Escondido (near San Diego), is a beautiful 12-acre monument to culture, a $75 million dollar investment in community spirit and quality of life. Unless, of course, you take note of the millions of dollars in operating deficits, poor attendance figures, and occasional lack of direction, in which case you might consider the center a financial albatross around the city’s neck. The center is ten years old this month, and a decade of varied success and failure has done nothing to quell the debate over the project.

Americans have always had ridiculous notions of how the native population of North America looks, acts, and lives. In fact, the absurd stereotypes heaped on the American Indian are so pervasive as to be a cultural phenomenon in themselves. But you won’t find any reference to such racist blather in Washington’s new Museum of the American Indian, with organizers hoping that “the sheer beauty and tone of the place will dispel the inaccurate mythology, jokes and war whoops that visitors grew up with. That basically includes anyone who watched TV or had a social studies class in the 20th century.” But is ignoring the misperceptions really the way to go?

The Republic of Georgia’s culture is in tatters, and the young president has his eye on rebuilding. “Despite its devastated economy, Georgia boasts a rich cultural heritage and an operatic and choreographic tradition renowned worldwide. It produced Balanchine. And it is famous for its unique three-voice polyphonic singing. Nearly everybody sings in Georgia — usually at the dinner table — and culture is viewed as an crucial part of life by Georgians, who in the midst of the civil war in the early 1990s continued to flow to the opera to support their artists. Today, half the population of Georgia lives under the poverty line, but the opera still plays to sell-out audiences every night.”

There’s a national election campaign going on in Australia. And what would the official opposition party do for the arts? “Opposition pledged to “ease the squeeze” on the ABC and turn around the decline in film and television production with $175 million in new arts funding. The ABC would get $105 million over four years, while the film industry would get an immediate $70 million injection, followed by a wide-ranging review into structural reform and private investment incentives.”

Scotland is locked in a debate about cultural funding, as high profile arts institutions say they are underfunded. Now a new study that measures the economic impact of the arts: “Every job in the arts community supports nearly another whole job elsewhere in the economy, the study by the Scottish Economic Policy Network revealed. It also shows that more than 4000 jobs are sustained by the annual funding provided by the Scottish Arts Council and in total the arts community supports £72.5m worth of income.”

It’s not too surprising that many artists are more politically liberal than conservative. What is unusual this election year, though, is that so many artists are actively making their political views known and are working to defeat George Bush…

More and more artists are making art about difficult events of the past few years. “In the week of the third anniversary of 9/11, it’s worth asking how they’re doing. For, ever so slowly, writers, film-makers and dramatists have begun to address the twin events that have dominated the start of the 21st century: the attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent Iraq war.”