Category: issues

Some New York arts leaders are wondering if the planning for the World Trade Center site has lost its focus and whether plans for arts facilities will be realized. “Lost in the debate over whether an opera house can fill its off-season or whether a dance and theater space could together attract sufficient funds, some arts leaders and planning experts say, is the more fundamental question of whether either of these options lives up to the grand plans for Lower Manhattan’s hallowed ground.”

Tuition for Columbia’s arts degree programs has risen so high, the school is losing prospects to other universities. “Last month, several hundred graduate students in the school’s visual arts, acting, writing and filmmaking programs marched across campus, protesting a decision to raise tuition to $33,052, from $31,240, in the fall. The school plans to continue increasing tuition 5.8 percent annually.”

Music is starting to flow again in Afghanistan. “A revolutionary musical revival is under way here after six years during which all music, even humming on the streets, was forbidden. The lively scene on Kabul’s version of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street is one indicator. Another is the birth of Radio Arman, a new station unlike anything Afghanistan has ever seen. ‘When you deprive someone of water for five days and then you finally give them some, you will see what the taste will be. That’s what music is to us Afghans’.”

“Researchers are now moving from establishing facts about the Maya towards understanding the meaning of their rituals. The decipherment of their script has been the greatest achievement of recent years. The Maya invented what may be the most complex writing system ever devised. It had both alphabetic and pictographic characters, and the “spelling” rules seem to have been largely aesthetic. The same word could be written in a dozen ways. The new exhibition contains superb examples of the most florid, which look more like sculpture than writing.”

So Michael Moore is a relentless promoter of his movies. And Dick Clarke had a book he was trying to sell. Why does that diminish what they’re selling? “Most people who create things — films, TV shows, books — naturally hope to have their creations experienced by as many people as possible. Second, the essence of capitalism is to come up with goods or services that one can sell and, by selling, generate a profit. Since when did the desire to be rewarded for one’s work become a grubby, back-alley enterprise for which one must be publicly scolded?”

The Durham (NC) City Council is considering a plan for “a 4,000-seat theater adjacent to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park and the American Tobacco complex renovation. Supporters of the proposed American Center for Performing Arts say the region needs a theater of this size, and that it would serve as a permanent home to the American Dance Festival, which has long outgrown crowded Duke University stages.” But media giant Clear Channel Communications would manage the theatre, and a coalition of other arts groups is coming together to oppose the plan.

Another art sales record was broken this month when a Picasso sold for over $100 million. But do such absurd sale prices actually tell us anything about the quality of art? “Such news always engenders in hearers the notion that something about the art has to justify the price in the way that the number of carats determines the value of diamonds. But it’s much more complicated than that, as the appeal of art objects depends on many factors apart from aesthetics.”

Economic impact studies are becoming the preferred method of convincing the citizenry to support public subsidies for arts and culture. But not everyone is buying the message: “The arts folks are trying to sell their idea… by using the vehicle the public seems eager to buy these days: It will help the economy. The arts’ pitch is smaller but not dissimilar to the pitch made by the biotech people. We can not only cure diseases, we were told, we can cure downturns in the business cycle… When we make these arguments long enough, other economists will come up with research that shows these are not such good investments. This will lead to more resistance to funding projects we probably ought to fund for the civic good.”

Audiologists are “seeing a growing number of musicians, singers, and even audience members who report ringing or buzzing in their ears — called ‘tinnitus’ — and duller hearing following a theatre performance, rock concert, or movie, with its blasting previews of upcoming features.”

Times have not been good lately in Davenport, Iowa, one of the four adjoining Iowa/Illinois river towns known as the Quad Cities. But the city is trying to make its own good luck with a $113.5 million revitalization program focused on making Davenport a cultural center for the region. From the wholesale renovation of a ballpark frequently called the most beautiful in all the minor leagues to a $9 million dollar museum and performance venue celebrating the city’s jazz/blues tradition to a spectacular new $34 million building housing the Davenport Museum of Art, civic leaders have unquestionably been putting their money where their mouths are.