Category: issues

The town of North Adams Massachusetts was a dying town when MassMOCA moved in. Now the town is rebuilding as a center of creative industry and people are moving in…

The UK government’s new “music manifesto,” which aims to put a renewed emphasis on music education in Britain, is being assailed by several high-profile musicians who say that it offers little in the way of substantive change, and by minority Conservative politicians who declared the document to be “of Wagnerian length with more hot air than the wind section of the London Philharmonic.” When asked for his own vision of how to improve music education, the Tory shadow arts minister suggested that schools should bring back regular hymn singing.

“Although the past two years were economically difficult for Seattle arts groups, including the biggest and richest, the proverbial corner seems to have been turned for some. Pacific Northwest Ballet not only balanced its $16.3 million budget this fiscal year but eliminated its 2-year-old $1.2 million accumulated deficit and restored its cash reserve fund of $580,000… The Seattle Symphony Orchestra ‘expects’ to balance its $20.9 million budget, and Seattle Opera is ‘cautiously optimistic’ that it will do the same with a budget of $20.7 million.”

“Determined to raise the city to the level of regional rivals like Tokyo and Hong Kong as well as Beijing, Shanghai officials have made culture a major priority. Beijing has its Forbidden City, its prestigious national schools and museums, its centuries-old neighborhoods that breathe Chinese culture, none of which Shanghai can realistically challenge. But like Tokyo, all but destroyed in World War II, this city is making a virtue of its newness.”

Canada’s actors’ union is celebrating the Liberal Party’s win in the recent federal election. “We look forward to working with the minority government to establish policy, legislate and make appointments that will protect and enhance Canadian cultural industries.”

The American border police have been making it more and more difficult for foreign journalists, authors and musicians to enter the US. “American businesses have “lost $30.7 billion in the last two years because of visa delays and denials for their foreign partners and employees, according to a survey sponsored by eight business organizations.”

“Faced with stiff opposition from the San Francisco arts crowd, Mayor Gavin Newsom has dropped his controversial budget proposal to merge the city’s Grant for the Arts program with the San Francisco Arts Commission — at least for now.”

After Congress passed legislature tightening accountablity on corporations, non-profits are looking at their management operating standards with an eye to reform. “Efforts at philanthropic self-policing have been launched across the nation. They aim to counter public perceptions that financial abuses may be widespread at charities and to deflect lawmakers’ calls for more federal regulation.”

So the Steve Kurtz “bioterrorism” case has been resolved, and Kurtz has been cleared of terrorism suspicion. “His case is the latest ‘whoops’ as America tries to regain its legal balance post-9/11. The government is walking the line between prosecution and persecution. In Kurtz’s case, it stumbled. Pre-9/11, that’s where it would have ended. Those days are gone. The FBI was called. Kurtz was arrested, his neighbors evacuated and a hazmat team in spacesuits picked through his trash. With the (Joe) McCarthy era, it was a Communist in every corner. Now it’s a terrorist lurking everywhere.”

George W. Bush may be a divisive leader to many, but there is no question that he has managed to unite one group like few U.S. politicians in history: artists, from painters to actors to musicians, are coming together in record numbers, all with the common goal of ridding the world of this American president. But when does political art become so strident that it ceases to be good art? “Many inside and outside the arts question whether such overt political expression — created expressly to effect change — crosses the line of art and simply becomes a colorful op-ed piece. It’s important for the art to stand on its own merits… regardless of the message within it.”