Category: issues

A year after Florida chopped its arts funding, how did Florida arts lovers get its legislature to approve 115-2 to restore $21 million a year in new funding? The old fashioned way – lobbying. “Before the first committee meeting of this legislative year, arts groups began flooding legislative offices with 200,000 multicolored protest cards, just one of the strategies dreamed up in weekly conference calls that organizers held with arts groups in each of the state’s 67 counties.”

Emily Hall is happy to see that a “backlash” is building against Richard Florida’s ideas about the “creative class.” “It didn’t take much nudging for people to start to see, among other flaws in his arguments, that he meant to improve social conditions for computer programmers rather than reform the way arts are funded in this country. Florida can claim as loudly as he likes that he never meant to be an arts advocate, but as far as I can tell, he was the keynote speaker at a gazillion ‘save the arts’ conferences all over the country, probably accepting nice little fees every time.”

Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center cleared its first regulatory hurdle this week when the Federal Commission of Fine Arts voted to approve the project for a new plaza. “We at last see the promise of the Kennedy Center, that it will be connected to the rest of the city. It is floating now in that tangle of spaghetti roadways. The design will go a long way to not only connecting it to the rest of the city, but you will be able to walk around it without getting run over.”

Last week Los Angeles officials were suggesting they might abolish the city’s cultural affairs department. But “Mayor James K. Hahn said Wednesday that he would preserve the agency and maintain its popular arts grants and educational programs while finding other ways to streamline it in the face of a municipal budget crisis. Hahn said he aimed to “refocus” the department, including giving it a new mandate to pump up tourism by promoting the city’s cultural attractions.”

Nashville officials have begun to plan what is being described as a “cultural cluster” for the downtown neighborhood which will soon play host to a new concert hall for the Nashville Symphony. The thinking is that while a concert hall alone can be good for a neighborhood, a vibrant collection of entertainment options is better, and if all goes as planned, the new concert hall could anchor a thriving district which would include a minor league baseball park, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and a massive entertainment complex. Of course, these things cost money…

“Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick made a brief appearance at Wednesday’s Detroit Public Schools board meeting to encourage district officials to reconsider plans to close the Communication and Media Arts High School. The school is scheduled to close and merge in January 2005 with the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts in a new, $120-million building off Woodward near Orchestra Hall… Dozens of parents, students and teachers said they feared the new school’s academic structure will not be as stringent as CMA’s. Currently, 95 percent of CMA graduates go on to higher education; 85 percent go on to 4-year colleges.”

Los Angeles mayor James Hahn has sent a letter to local arts groups informing them that he plans to slash the budget of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and transfer the money to “basic services” such as public safety and street repair. The exact dollar amount of the mayor’s cutback hasn’t been specified, but current budget projections show a cut of nearly 60%. In place of direct subsidies, Mayor Hahn is creating a council of wealthy Angelenos to encourage private donations to the arts.

Only a decade ago, the letters ‘NEA’ would bring a scowl to the face of conservative US politicians, and images of urine-soaked crosses to the minds of the general public. The arts endowment’s budget was gutted during those years, and many assumed that the country’s tradition of federal support for the arts had finally been killed off. But this year, the decidedly conservative Bush administration called on Congress to sharply increase the NEA’s budget, and the taint of controversy seems to have vanished in the hands of the endowment’s soothing new director, Dana Gioia. “The NEA’s turnaround has been achieved, in part, through high-profile tours of unassailable works and by reaching out to traditionally underserved areas, including Southern states.”

A Maryland concert hall scheduled to open next summer is running into roadblocks from politicians who are not overly eager to take responsibility for covering cost overruns. Strathmore Hall, which was budgeted to cost $100 million and will become the second home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is supposed to draw the adjoining metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. together in suburban Montgomery County, but so far, county and state officials can’t agree on who should be responsible for unforeseen costs at the site. The county has asked the state for an additional $3 million in assistance to finish the project, but state budget analysts say that they’ve already contributed more than $44 million, and the county needs to pick up the slack.

The Florida House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to restore $21 million in annually guaranteed arts funding to the state budget, one year after cutting the subsidy in order to balance the budget. But the restoration still faces a decidedly rocky path to victory, with key Republican legislators vowing to fight it in the State Senate, and Governor Jeb Bush threatening a veto if it ever reaches his desk.