Category: issues

An odd mix of participants – “ambient DJs, academics, experimental arts promoters, nutty conceptual artists, hard-bitten journalists and certifiable, electronic nerds” – recently boarded a ship to hash out issues in electronic arts. “Like some variant on the archetypal ‘ship of fools’, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004 decided to transport itself by boat from Helsinki (Finland) to Tallinn (Estonia), creating a hothouse for performers, discussions and socialising.”

With the addition of a new Clyfford Still Museum project, Denver’s list of cultural projects has grown large, with a half-dozen major fund-raising efforts threatening to bump into one another. The city’s mayor is unconcerned. In the city “there is an unending level of needs. Does that mean you turn away a new opportunity? No. It comes down to some form of Darwinian selection. What a community truly cherishes and values, it will support.”

A year-and-a-half after Keith Windschuttle published his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, the Australian academic world is “still anguishing over its impact. It is terrified of what he will do next. Windschuttle struck at the heart of the accepted view of Australian colonial history in the past 30 years – that the settler society had engaged in a pattern of conquest, dispossession and killing of the indigenous inhabitants. The facts, he said, did not stack up.”

It’s been three years of cuts in arts funding at the state and local level in America. So are things about to get better? A look around the country doesn’t give much reason for optimism.

There is an awful lot of anti-Bush art making the rounds these days. “You don’t need a conspiracy theory or an imminent Republican convention to explain why there is so much Bush-bashing entertainment today: Mr. Bush is in power. The opposition is generally more motivated, but perhaps not as galvanized as it seems to be this year.”

Edinburgh, Shmedinburgh… There’s a serious new festival rival to the Scottish behemoth. It’s Kilkenny, where “what used to be a local arts week has transformed into an international festival that is becoming a viable alternative to its bigger, brasher Scottish counterpart. Last year, Kilkenny acquired a dynamic new director in the shape of Claudia Woolgar, who has tilted the festival towards eastern Europe.”

The Irish National Museum dismisses claims in a new book that Ireland is the mythic city of Atlantis. An archaeologist has “linked Newgrange passage tomb and the Hill of Tara with ancient remnants of the mythical Atlantis- first described by Greek thinker Plato. But National Museum director Dr Patrick Wallace said today that there was no archaeological basis to associate Ireland with the utopian land.”

Who best to represent your city to visitors? How about taxi drivers? The city of Liverpool thinks so. It’s looking for drivers who “will be expected to speak about Liverpool’s theatres, galleries, concert halls and the city’s artistic heritage: ‘There’s the Playhouse, where the young Beryl Bainbridge trod the boards and Blood Brothers was first done’.”

“Artists are mobilizing in historic numbers for the Republican National Convention, volunteering for duty in the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues, and Ideas, the Unconvention, and other specially organized programs that offer opportunities to sing, act, dance, joke, and otherwise comment on the current state of the disunion. Progressive culture vultures may thrill at the gargantuan menu of politicized performances, screenings, exhibits, stand-up marathons, and concerts planned around the four-day coronation of George W. But if Michael Moore’s $100 million-plus blockbuster can’t breach the country’s red-state/blue-state mental divide, what can we reasonably expect from an army of fringe acts sprinkled with mega-star cameos?”

For a trio of Arizona arts groups, the news is good: “The Phoenix Symphony, Arizona Opera and Ballet Arizona all announced last week that they closed fiscal 2003-04 with surpluses.”