Category: issues

Miami’s Community Relations Board is asking that the city’s police department turn over all its records of a controversial program which monitors and investigates local rappers and other members of the hip-hop community. The department acknowledged earlier this month that it has been specifically keeping tabs on rappers, leading to charges of institutional racism. The police claim that it makes good sense to keep files on artists who make their living rapping about violence, crime, and hatred of law enforcement.

When college writing instructor Jan Richman first read the horrifying tale of sexual violence and murder that one of her students handed in last fall, she was taken aback by its gruesome detail and terrifyingly unsympathetic tone. But being a teacher, she chose to address the story in literary terms with her class, and to use it as a way to discuss the difference between gratuitous repulsiveness and violent imagery in the service of literature. But “before the week was out, the student was expelled and sent home, the instructor was fighting for her job, and many students and faculty were left wondering about issues of artistic and academic freedom in the post-Columbine era of heightened fear over student safety.”

Back in 1970, a UK gallery displaying several drawings by John Lennon was prosecuted by the crown for supposedly violating an obscenity statute by publicly showing Lennon’s work. The case was thrown out on a technicality, and was chalked up to overzealous prosecution. But new documents released by the National Archives show that the case against Lennon’s art could have been much more serious, had not the prosecutor been alerted to the potentially wider implications of such a prosecution, and reconsidered, lest his actions lead to a nationwide precedent of censorship.

A decade after the genocide that left more than 800,000 dead, Rwanda is building memorial centers. “Ten years on, Rwanda is erecting its first proper memorials – and racing to complete them by April 7, the anniversary of the first day of slaughter, when centres will open their doors to survivors, perpetrators, scholars and tourists. For those who have kept guard over mass grave sites lest the remains – proof of the genocide – disappear, these centres offer a chance to end their vigil and rebuild their lives.”

The comparison isn’t too crass, writes Andrew Taylor. “The most striking thing about this comparison is how differently the savvy mall developer and most cultural facility developers speak about what they do. With the shopping mall, at least among these two visionaries, design is about the consumers and how they engage with their world — what draws them in, keeps them in, and lowers their barriers to purchase. With cultural facilities, we seem, instead, to focus on the producers in the equation — the symphony, theater company, road shows — and what they need to produce their seasons.”

Civic boosters in Lincoln, Illinois want to build an “Honest Abe” theme park, complete with animatronic figures from history. “Invoking images of Disneyland, the project’s backers promise to build a dignified family attraction, not a kitschy carnival. “There would be nothing degrading about this. It’s a great idea. It’s called edu-tainment.”

Why is the US government refusing to allow Cuban artists into the United States? “In a profound way, our government takes on the role of oppressor when it tries to control which artists will be allowed access to our minds and our hearts. We may think we are isolating Cuba with our embargo and our travel restrictions, but it is we Americans who are becoming isolated. People travel to Cuba from Australia, Britain, Canada, Italy and Spain — countries we consider staunch allies.”

Why is the US Congress making such a big deal about obscenity on the broadcast airwaves? Frank Rich says it’s politics: “While the current uproar over broadcast indecency is ostensibly all about sex, it is still all about politics, especially in an election year when a culture war rages. Washington’s latest crew of Puritan enforcers — in the administration, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission — are all pandering to a censorious Republican political base that is the closest thing America has to its own Taliban. The media giants, fearful of losing the deregulatory financial favors the federal government can bestow, will knuckle under accordingly until the coast is clear.”

Last week, Los Angeles’ mayor relented and decided not to kill the city’s cultural department to save money. “It remains to be seen whether the mayor’s redefined Cultural Affairs Department is more than a political tactic to quiet angry arts supporters as the city struggles to close an estimated $250-million budget shortfall. But the arts community shouldn’t simply declare victory and accept the mayor’s largely commercial vision of his new arts council. Rather, it should emerge from the affair with a new determination to position arts and culture at the center of city life.”

As state governments in America find their budgets squeezed, money for education is being cut. And educators, looking for places to cut, are choosing to kill arts education. In California, “music enrollment statewide is at a 20-year low, according to the latest statistics. From a high of 1.1 million students in the 1999-2000 school year, music participation plummeted to 624,516 students last year. The trend is disturbing to music teachers and others now that more is known about how the arts benefit academics.”