Category: issues

As new technology continues to make the sharing of information ever simpler and ever faster, many countries around the world are actively seeking out the best ways to make use of the new tools, and the newly available information. But not in the U.S.: in fact, America is doing everything it can to stem the flow of information, putting in place dozens of new regulations designed to protect “intellectual property.” It’s a typically American idea to think that we can engage the world on our terms alone, bullying and regulating it into submission, says Thomas Goetz, and one that’s been tried before. The trouble is, it doesn’t work.

Thanks to centuries of erosion, decades of tourism, and countless incidents of vandalism, the Great Wall of China is barely a third of its original impressive self. “It is the clearest indication yet that booming China is failing to use its new wealth to conserve what ought to be a source of national pride. Renovations that have been carried out have ended with clumsy exploitation, such as at Badaling, where tourists can ride toboggans and cable cars, eat at a KFC outlet and have their picture taken with camels and life-size cutouts of Mao Zedong.” The Badaling section of the wall alone attracts more than 10 million visitors per year.

“In an effort to revitalize Staten Island and make it a cultural destination for all New Yorkers, the city has invested $8 million to develop and expand Staten Island’s Snug Harbor Cultural Center (SHCC), an 83-acre complex that mixes art, music, and theatre… The infusion of cash — half of the money has already been spent to restore the venerable, 750-seat Music Hall — marks a major shift in the center’s mission, vision, and purpose.”

“Visitors to this week’s unveiling of Frank Gehry’s much-anticipated redesign of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario will find themselves on the receiving end of a protest against the planned $190-million renovation and expansion.” The same community activists who railed against the AGO’s last expansion, in the early 1990s, are claiming that the AGO’s process has ignored community concerns, and will “likely will be in violation of a 1989 agreement and bylaw brokered by the Ontario Municipal Board that… commits the AGO to holding its expansion at what transpired in 1993.” Not surprisingly, the AGO disagrees with that interpretation.

“The Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropy with nearly $750 million in assets, on Monday night [awarded] grants of $50,000 each to four Midwest cultural groups for the commissioning of works by artists of color.” Recipients of this year’s awards are Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The awards are slated to continue for at least two years, at which time the foundation will reevaluate the program.

The under-construction Dallas Center for the Performing Arts gets a very public boost this week, with a donation of $1 million from the family of late Dallas mayor Annette Strauss. “Supporters of the $275 million performing arts center hope to raise $257 million in private funds for its design and completion, with the rest coming from city bond money. The center’s opening is targeted for 2009. The Strauss family contribution brings the amount of private donations to $140 million.”

Taking on Ticketmaster is not generally considered a sound business plan. The ticket-selling behemoth seems to be everywhere, and artists, venues, and rival companies which have tried to break free have typically been stymied or flattened. “But even with annual revenues around $700 million US, Ticketmaster only controls less than seven per cent of the global ticketing industry, a sector that is growing at 7.5 per cent a year,” and two Calgary-based entrepreneurs are making a real stab at grabbing a share of the remaining 93%. “Since its September 2000 launch RepeatSeat has grown quickly. Last year it handled $7 million in transactions, up from $5,000 the year before.”

Ever since the FCC ruled that the pop singer Bono hadn’t violated any obscenity laws by uttering the word “fucking” on a live awards telecast, with the rationale being that he used the word as an adjective, conservative watchdog groups have been up in arms. Congress is considering a bill which would ban such language outright from the public airwaves, and the Supreme Court may even have to weigh in eventually. Such histrionics often miss the point, says Brian Lambert, and the fact is that the Supreme Court is already on record concerning what constitutes obscenity. Not that such niceties as facts have ever stopped culture warriors on either side of the political divide…

“The definition of art is not something that anyone would lightly undertake. Nor would it normally be left to a US customs official to decide. But that is exactly what happened in October 1926,” when an extraordinary legal battle erupted over a Constantin Brancusi statue being brought into the U.S. “The point was that ordinary merchandise was subject to duty at 40 per cent, while art was not. And the customs official on duty at the time happened to be an amateur sculptor – just the sort of person to have bumptiously confident views about matters aesthetic. He took one look at the Brancusis, concluded that they weren’t art, and levied $4,000 duty.”

Dr Gunther von Hagens is not a popular man in the art world to begin with, having made his name by embalming human corpses with plastic, skinning them, and then displaying them with organs exposed. But Svetlana Krechetova is no ordinary art critic: according to a lawsuit she has filed against Hagens, the good doctor used her father’s body without permission, after corrupt mortuary staff told her that the body had been cremated. Hagens is also facing charges that he recently accepted the bodies of executed Chinese dissidents.