Category: issues

“Rather than rejecting popular culture outright, a growing number of Christians are producing and consuming their own popular media on the fringes of the mainstream entertainment industry. Still others are gathering in church basements and living rooms to promote their own brand of media literacy—seeing commercial culture as a “window” into the culture of unbelievers. What we see here is consistent with what media scholars have found within other subcultural communities—a desire to make and distribute your own media and the desire to challenge and critique mainstream media.”

The city of Berlin thought companies would flow into the city to invest after the city was unified. It hasn’t happened, and Berlin is broke. Now, small creative enterprises are springing up in vacant buildings across the old East Berlin, “many of them former squatter colonies gone legit. Their stock in trade is art, music, publishing, software. ‘You can see them as seedbeds. These developments everywhere in these derelict places are perhaps the best hope the city has for better times’.”

The city of Los Angeles is facing a budget crisis. So officials are considering “eliminating Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs and Environmental Affairs departments. The Cultural Affairs Department grants about $3 million each year to the arts, offers neighborhood classes for adults and children, oversees a city-owned gallery and theaters, and is in charge of the landmark Watts Towers.”

Great to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the creator of Dr. Seuss. “But exactly which Dr. Seuss is being celebrated? Is it the literary Seuss, creator of charmingly anarchic, oddball characters whose adventures are recounted in ingenious nonsense verse? Or is it the Seuss of Hollywood and myriad product tie-ins who has been “interpreted” and marketed and theme-parked within an inch–maybe beyond–of his reputation?”

Scottish arts groups, looking for more funding, are unlikely to get it from the government. “The Scotsman has learned that the best-case scenario under the Executive’s three-year comprehensive spending review is a 2.5 per cent increase in arts funding, barely in line with inflation. The worst is said to be a cut of as much as 10 per cent.”

William Safire has had a change of heart about the National Endowment for the Arts: “Remember the hoo-ha a while back about the funding of edgy art, offensive to some taxpayers, by the National Endowment for the Arts? That controversy is over. The N.E.A. has raised a banner of education and accessibility to which liberal and conservative can repair.”

It’s been five years since the announcement of a new £22 million arts center for the city of Belfast, and very little progress seems to have been made. For one thing, not everyone in the arts community wants a big, unwieldy, centralized home for the city’s myriad groups, fearing that it will detract from neighborhood-based art. For another, the plans for the center seem as much about revitalizing a run-down section of the city as they do about promoting culture, and many prominent arts groups have already issued a polite “no, thank you” to the invitation.

“Stephen Page, the artistic director of the 2004 Adelaide Festival that began on February 27 and runs until March 14, has put together a program that, by importing plenty of foreign acts, is intent on making amends for Peter Sellars’ home-grown, half-baked fiasco of two years ago… Although he defends the American director’s festival as ‘the most cutting edge’ he has seen in its ambition of embracing community, social and regional concerns – ‘it was sloppy; it had no order’. So Page, charged with bringing the the festival back from the brink, which includes regaining corporate confidence and that of the politicians who ran a mile from the Sellars fall-out, has shaped a something-for-everyone program.”

To hear most people tell it, you would think that Los Angeles is a sun-drenched wasteland of zombified Hollywood dunderheads, sipping mineral water while they sit in traffic on their way to yet another insipid premiere. As far as arts and culture go, most East Coasters would probably smirk at the mention of such things existing in L.A. But while the rest of North America looks down its nose, Los Angeles has quietly become one of the continent’s best arts towns, and other cities would do well to follow its example, says Martin Knelman.

It’s difficult to imagine the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara being pleased with the idea of his face being plastered all over posters, t-shirts, umbrellas, and other assorted trinkets. But at some point in recent years, the famous portrait of Guevara was usurped by the bizarre and irony-proof world of high fashion, and now, the face represents nothing more than any other hot look of the current season. “How did an avowed Marxist become, literally, the poster boy for conspicuous capitalist consumption? Is it Che’s story that fascinates, or has his memory been usurped by that sole image, one that speaks to a life many know little, if anything, about?”