Category: issues

In 2002, promises and hopes sailed high for Boston’s Strand Theatre, a converted vaudeville house being rebirthed as a community performing arts center. “Less than two years later, the Strand’s books are soaked in red ink. The Strand’s 1,400-seat auditorium is dark on most evenings, and it droops with inactivity during the daytime. Paint is peeling, chairs are broken, and a city maintenance crew recently replaced 150 dead light bulbs that had been left in their sockets.”

A few years ago, then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani pledged $24 million a year for ten years to Lincolnm Center’s rebuilding project. But new mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to reduce the amount. “For the next fiscal year Mr. Bloomberg’s preliminary budget has reduced Lincoln Center’s $24 million allotment to $5 million. City officials acknowledge that these measures indicate an increasingly hard-line approach toward cultural organizations, the largest of which is Lincoln Center.”

The National Endowment for the Arts seems to be politically free of trouble these days. “NEA Chairman Dana Gioia gives the NEA’s foes a challenge they’ve never encountered before: a cultural traditionalist running the agency. (Gioia is a poet who has written for publications such as the New Criterion.) ‘I don’t know how you create art unless you love the past.’ Many conservative regard Gioia as one of Bush’s finest appointments.”

Today’s London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. “Perhaps the secret of London’s success as a home to so many different nationalities is that is almost impossible to feel foreign in a city where you are likely to hear Cantonese at one street corner and Italian at the next, where your corner shop is run by Sri Lankans and where your minicab late at night is driven by a Nigerian.”

Lawrence Lessig thinks that a copyright law that declares that millions of people are criminals is wrong. “I think artists should be allowed to decide what the rules are under which their content is made available in a good copyright system. Sometimes that means their content is made available under compulsory license, which means they get paid but not a price that they set, sometimes they’ll give it away. Sometimes their copyright expires, at least that’s what was supposed to happen. And copyrights that expire [go into] the public domain.”

Suddenly, content in the media is getting the once over for “objectionable” material. “Hoping to avoid millions of dollars in fines and protect their licenses, the networks’ gatekeepers are now rushing to cover naked body parts, cut foul language and monitor anything that smacks of poor taste … except when they’re not. The only consistent thread running through the current crackdown — which has ensnared culprits ranging from a chronic provocateur like ousted radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge to an accidental offender like NBC’s “ER” — is how wildly inconsistent it all seems.”

Iraq’s National Theate is up and runnig again, and a week-long festival of plays, dance and music is being produced. There’s still not much of an audience yest, in a city once renowned for its cultural life. “The situation is still very complicated. It is difficult to start living culturally again.”

The city of Philadelphia has a $227 million deficit it needs to cover. So the city’s mayor proposes cuts, including eliminating the city’s annual $2.25 million appropriation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art – “just as it and other stakeholders along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway are ramping up efforts to promote the Parkway as a major destination.”

A new report on the condition of artists in New York since 9/11 says that “despite huge infusions of crisis-aid funding from both public and private sources, a new study finds that artists, including performing artists, are still suffering great economic misfortunes with very little end in sight.”

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin may have thought he would get some accolades from the arts sector after his budget calling for the restoration of millions of dollars to the nation’s Television Fund, but it isn’t happening. In fact, outside of the TV industry, the Liberal government’s budget is being called a disappointment by nearly every arts advocate within earshot of a reporter. The arts world has been wary of the Martin government ever since the PM appointed a sports specialist as his heritage minister, and while the new budget doesn’t make any cuts to the cultural budget, the lack of any significant increases seems to have confirmed many artists’ suspicion that the arts aren’t a priority with Martin.