Category: issues

California’s State Arts Council may be destitute at the moment, but not everyone in the Golden State has forgotten about the arts. An unexpected windfall is on the horizon, in the form of contributions from the sales of a fast-selling California travel book created especially to generate revenue for the Arts Council.

“Provided the planet survives long enough for us to observe these muddled times from a safe distance, music historians might someday credit George W. Bush’s presidency with giving rock ‘n’ roll activism its biggest boost since the Vietnam War… it was big news last week when heartland hero Bruce Springsteen — one of those performers who’s always come across as political without being overtly so — stepped into the coming U.S. election fray by announcing he would join such disparate types as R.E.M., John Fogerty, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews, Death Cab for Cutie, Bonnie Raitt, Jurassic 5 and Babyface in a series of anti-Bush concerts to be held in American ‘swing states’ this coming October.”

Washington choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess has spent his summer in Peru, touring with his own company and working with the country’s own national troupe. “What made Burgess’s Peru trip possible was the State Department’s American Cultural Specialists program. The program, which sent 66 artists abroad last year, promotes cross-cultural exchange through the arts… [The] program is one contemporary example of the federally sponsored international tour, a practice that was at its height during the Cold War period and has always functioned with a combination of public and private funding.”

“It’s not quite the Parthenon marbles, but Oxford University is sending back to Greece a small cultural treasure with roots almost as ancient, in honour of the Olympic games. At the closing Olympic ceremony in Athens on August 29, a British former Olympic fencer, Dame Mary Glen-Haig, will recite lines in a poetic form first heard there 2,500 years ago… The treasure is a Pindaric ode – a strict verse form which is regarded as one of the most perfect and most imitated in poetry.”

The Baltimore Sun recently refused to run an ad for a local art gallery which featured a “stamp-sized, black-and-white reproduction of a nude,” citing the conservative bent of the paper’s readership. The owner of the gallery is puzzled: after all, the Sun regularly runs ads for strip clubs and massage parlors. Furthermore, “on its news pages, The Sun has repeatedly published artistic images of nudes, including paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse, Michelangelo’s David, and renderings of Honore Balzac by Auguste Rodin.”

Whe New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans this summer to reinvigorate the city’s school arts curriculum, teachers and school administrators were thrilled, and observers dared to hope that the long, devastating slide in New York’s arts education program might finally be reversed. But upon closer observation, it appears that there may be a key ingredient missing from Mayor Bloomberg’s plan: the money to implement it.

The city of Phoenix has announced a multi-pronged strategy aimed at nurturing the arts in the urban core. Under the terms of the proposal, a loan fund wuld be created expressly for the purchase and renovation of downtown buildings by artists, artists would be given economic incentives to locate downtown, and a portion of the city center would be designated as an official “arts district.”

There is “an emerging camp of artists who see today’s shifting marketplace as one that can support the lives and work of artists—business-savvy artists. And their idea could change the face of fine arts higher education. ‘This is not just about getting artists to sell their work; this is about helping artists live a life with art in it, which can mean anything from starting neighborhood arts projects to placing one’s work in corporate settings to attract attention’.”

Daniel Barenboim speaks out against the level of the UK government’s support of the arts. “Music has become a specialised commodity for both performers and audiences. Young people do come to concerts – that is not the problem. The problem is that we have lost the intellectuals. And when that happens its role in society diminishes.” He ascribed this decline to the reduction of music education. “Music is a strange animal, in that you cannot explain a Beethoven symphony in words. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have content, but if you reduce music education you not only get fewer musicians and audiences but also you take away the sense of content.”

A plan to take away subsidized housing for artists in St. Petersburg, Russia has brought out the artists to protest. “A number of them arrived at the Legislative Assembly with banners bearing the slogans: “[Governor Valentina] Matviyenko, don’t be grudging, buy paintings!”; “St Petersburg is for the rich, the bandits and the thieves”; “Culture’s grave-diggers are Russia’s grave-diggers”; “The artists’ canvasses bind the feet of the city administration”; and also a quotation from Nekrasov – “There have been worse times, but none as mean!” “If the studios are going to be sold, then the artists will either have to leave for the West, or change their profession”.