Category: issues

It took writer Ian McEwan 24 hours to get across the border into the United States this week. Now he has a stamp in his passport that says he was denied entry, which could cause problems the next time he travels to the US. Inconsistent border procedures are being blamed on his delay. “What happened to Ian McEwan illustrates the inconsistencies in the process to enter this country, and this happens more often than most people think. The only reason that we are even aware of this incident is because Mr. McEwan is famous.”

“The battle to force not-for-profits, including arts groups, to strengthen their fiscal accountability has moved from Congress, where it raged during 2003, to the states, where three attorneys general are pushing tough, charity-regulating legislation.”

A controversial piece of Canadian legislation which would have extended the copyright of certain works of literature – most notably, the Anne of Green Gables series – has apparently died in Parliament, but the story of how it met its demise is as rife with political intrigue as the question of how such a specific measure found its way into legislative print in the first place. The estate of Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Green Gables books, had pushed especially hard for passage, and questions are swirling about the political influence of the Montgomery family as a result.

Finally – an agreement. Now the first phase of Lincoln Center’s badly-needed redevelopment can get started. “The first phase of this grand effort is to improve West 65th Street. Now it feels less like a thoroughfare and more like an oversize back alley. A hulking overhang crosses the street, throwing much of it into perpetual shadow, and the walls of Lincoln Center on either side loom large and forbidding. Early redesigns featured bright marquees, a transparent bridge and a wide staircase leading up into Lincoln Center on the south side of the street.”

Audience behavior has got worse and worse in recent years. “Why is this sort of behaviour so common in theatres nowadays? Presumably because we live in a restless channel-flicking culture, where concentration is no longer a virtue. Epidemics of coughing and chatting can, of course, serve as a valid critical response to a tedious spectacle. Yet they are mostly just a manifestation of inattention, laziness, and sheer selfish rudeness. And I’m convinced that people don’t switch off their mobile phones because sub-consciously they crave the distraction.”

Construction is beginning on the $630 million redevlopment of the area around the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Called the BAM Cultural District, the idea, on the drawing board since 1998, is only now beginning to take shape. The project is spearheaded by Harvey Lichtenstein, who served as BAM executive director from 1967 to 1999 and who now heads up the BAM Local Development Corporation, in charge of turning the idea of a cultural district into reality.”

Creating a workable formula for local arts funding is always a tricky project, but when your metropolitan area spans two different states, it becomes a major headache. Kansas City has struggled with different funding methods for years, and now, the city’s Metropolitan Cultural Fund has proposed a new system under which arts groups from across the region would compete for multiple “pools” of funding, which would come from a multicounty, bistate tax. But opposition is already being marshaled to the plan, which would require voters in all affected counties in both Missouri and Kansas to approve the new tax. Some opponents just plain don’t like public arts grants, but others consider it an issue of state sovereignty.

Philadelphia’s arts community is struggling to assess the impact of major cuts in the city’s arts funding. “The mayor balanced his $3.4 billion budget proposal in part with about $4 million in cultural cuts.”

Current laws on copyright are not serving the cause of creativity and are hampering the production of new works. “Existing laws are simply not good enough to cope with the creative possibilities which are open to us all in the digital world. We need to find the balance between the freedom exemplified by the Grey Album and the anarchy towards which completely unregulated sharing of stolen intellectual property could lead.”

Disney has won its case against a small firm that claimed rights and royalties from the Winnie the Pooh franchise. The judge chided the plaintif for its “willingness to tamper with, and even corrupt, the litigation process constitutes a substantial threat to the integrity of the judicial process. Disney officials had earlier claimed the confidential documents were stolen on behalf of SSI by a private investigator in the early 1990s.”