Category: issues

Is what happened with the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib the fault of sleazy American pop culture? Frank Rich says some are making the argument. “If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a “few bad apples” in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or “Mean Girls,” or maybe “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

“The civic pride and freedoms of Britain’s great regional cities have been “brutally gutted” during the past 100 years and power must be given back to them, the Guardian Hay book festival was told on its opening day.”

Scotland is undergoing a study of its cultural landscape in order to help the government formulate its funding priorities. But critics warn that a “scarcity of reliable facts and figures will hamper the work of the new commission, established a month ago by the Scottish Executive to inform and shape the future of arts and culture in Scotland.”

Pope John Paul II is concerned that America is turning into a “soulless” nation. “To fight this, the pontiff argued, the U.S. church must study contemporary culture to find a way to appeal to youths. He made his remarks to bishops from Indianapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee who were making a periodic visit to the Vatican. The American church ‘is called to respond to the profound religious needs and aspirations of a society increasingly in danger of forgetting its spiritual roots and yielding to a purely materialistic and soulless vision of the world’.”

Canadian arts advocates are trying to make sure some consideration of arts policy is included in the country’s national election next month. “While organizations like the Heritage Canada Foundation and Friends of Canadian Broadcasting say they know the issue of culture won’t make or break an election campaign, their tactics are designed to ensure it becomes part of the general political debate.”

New York City arts groups are protesting mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to slash city arts funding. “We are sending a distress signal to the mayor and the City Council that if the budget is adopted at this level, it would become the fourth year in a row that the city’s cultural institutions have been seriously underfunded. Instead of helping the city to rebound, the proposed cuts risk severely imperiling the fiscal health of our city’s most cherished cultural treasures.”

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center’s executive leaders held their annual meeting this week, and the good news was that, after several years of deficits, SPAC finished better than $100,000 in the black this past season. The bad news is that the center’s members and subscribers are furious with the management for dumping New York City Ballet from the roster of guest artists, and several are already making plans to oust board members in next year’s board elections. SPAC officials are sticking to their guns, though, insisting that “attendance ultimately will determine the future of all classical programming, including ballet, the Philadelphia Orchestra and a chamber music festival.”

Did a New York City deputy mayor call arts leaders and ask if they were donating money to the mayor’s opponent? “According to three sources, Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris rebuked the arts and cultural executives in recent months, and in one instance used a City Hall telephone to do so. Some arts officials said her calls had the effect of scaring [Mayor Bloomberg’s opponent’s] donors out of future contributions, and critics said she blurred the line between government and campaign politics.”

“Chronically behind in their fundraising, Orange County [California] Performing Arts Center officials said Tuesday that they will issue $180 million in bonds to ensure completion of a theater and a 2,000-seat concert hall. Center officials said they have raised $117 million in cash and pledges toward their $200-million goal to pay for the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the 500-seat Samueli Theater and an education center. Officials previously said they had hoped to raise $130 million by the end of 2003. But in the past 11 months they have raised only about $5 million.”

An unprecedented bistate tax proposal is headed to the voters of Kansas City and its surrounding suburbs. The initiative, which calls for a quarter-cent sales tax to be collected for 15 years in order to support arts and sports projects in the area, is complex because of the geographical location of the city. Kansas City proper actually stretches across the Missouri-Kansas state line (technically divided into two separate cities,) and the metro area stretches far and wide in both states. The ballot measure was approved after months of haggling over how the money from the tax would be divided – more than 50% of the funds will go to small community groups.