Category: issues

Cleveland voters go to the polls tuesday to vote on a measure that would provide $100 million for economic development. “Half the money would underwrite job creation, worker training and retraining, brownfield cleanup and business start-ups. The other half would go to cultural groups and artists through a county-run grant process involving the review of applicants by panels of community leaders and out-of-region arts experts.”

Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” ideas have been widely embraced in America. But there’s a backlash, and he is “taking political hits from the right and the left “There is just one problem: The basic economics behind [Florida’s] ideas don’t work,” writes one critic. Another “calls Florida’s city-revitalization theory ‘so wrong and backward that it reads like satire.’ Florida has mistaken the side effects of a booming economy for the causes of growth. After all, ‘Potemkin bohemias’ are not going to get old steel cities humming again.”

Gay marriage is an inevitable social certainty, writes Frank Rich. “The polls find a clear majority of those ages 18 to 29 in favor of same-sex marriage. In America, generational turnover is destiny — especially when it’s plugged into capitalism. In a country where only half the families are intact heterosexual marriages with children, those that break the old mold are a huge developing market — for weddings, tourism, housing and anything else American ingenuity can conjure up for consumption.”

Members of France’s intelligentsia have risen up to complain that the French government is attacking the country’s “intelligence.” “Underneath the polemics, as usual, lie money and politics. The protesters say that President Jacques Chirac’s government has been trimming cultural, educational and scientific budgets to the detriment of the country’s ‘intelligence.’ While the government has a solid majority in parliament and the Socialist opposition is in disarray, the intellectuals are using next month’s nationwide regional elections to get attention.”

At the World Trade Center site, “an unusual nexus of arts philanthropies, arts organizations, and far-thinking designers is set to create an autonomous complex fostering the creative spirit on stage, page, and canvas. Tentatively dubbed the ‘Arts Incubator,’ the project is being bankrolled by such well-heeled organizations as the American Express Foundation and the Norman Lear Family Foundation and will be the handiwork of architect-turned-set-designer David Rockwell and Kevin Kennon.”

President Bush’s proposal to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent is a good thing, right? So why are so many arts supporters talking down the idea?

There’s been a big drop in students enrolling in math classes in UK and in the number of teachers to teach it. How to entice more into the math game? Maybe the government should make tuition for maths free. Or even pay students to take it up?

“Over the past few months, the State Department has cracked down on Cuban visitors – specifically artists – seeking to enter the United States. Since November, every Cuban musician who applied for a visa — 151 in all — has been turned down, including the five Grammy nominees invited to the recent awards’ ceremony. The State Department denies a specific policy against musicians, although officials appear to have raised the bar for performers who want to tour the United States.”

“Like it or not, and most critics don’t, people turn to theater critics more for consumer advice than for wit, wisdom, perspective, or any of the other lofty reasons that are taught in Criticism 101. As time and money become more scrunched, readers are less interested in how Samuel Beckett may have influenced David Mamet or whether August Wilson ever read Eugene O’Neill than whether they should shell out up to a hundred bucks for a theater ticket.”

Connecticut governor John Rowland has been a major supporter of the arts. Now the governmor’s in trouble, and his “troubles couldn’t come at a worse time for cultural groups. The arts are weathering tough economic times locally, statewide and nationally. New initiatives are being downsized or postponed. And a new state super-agency – established by the legislature at the governor’s urging last year to oversee the state’s interests in tourism, arts, history, culture and film – is still finding its identity, focus and voice. During this time of trials and tribulations for the governor, is the arts agenda lost?”