Category: issues

You can hardly turn around these days without encountering some public scold decrying the influence of violent movies, video games, and television shows on the behavior of the public at large. At the same time, you rarely hear anyone threatening to slap warning labels on books, lest any susceptible souls take them seriously. But literature has long influenced some of the world’s most notorious crackpots, (the Aum Shinrikyo cult took some of its ideas from an Isaac Asimov novel,) and such notorious terrorists as Timothy McVeigh are known to have worshipped at the altar of a terrifying book of hate called The Turner Diaries, not at the game console of Grand Theft Auto.

“An exhibit at the Oakland Museum examining how the war transformed California is scheduled to open in August. But instead of putting the finishing touches on the exhibit, the museum is working to repair its relationship with the Vietnamese American community. The damage control comes after the museum’s Oct. 24 dismissal of researcher Mimi Nguyen days after she submitted a memo complaining that the exhibit was not sufficiently inclusive of ethnic minorities.” The controversy has been widely reported in California’s Vietnamese press, and a groundswell of popular support for Nguyen is causing headaches for the museum.

So what kind of year was it for the arts in the UK? “The Arts Council itself can always be relied upon to provide a little black comedy. The esteemed organisation paid consultants over £70,000 to remove the words “the” and “of” from its name, so it was transformed from The Arts Council of England to the stunningly different Arts Council England. A triumph for branding professionals everywhere.”

“The launch of a long-promised review of Scotland’s arts policy has been delayed to reflect better the First Minister’s new agenda for ‘cultural rights’… The cultural review – seen as the Scottish Executive’s move to put its post-devolutionary stamp on the arts – is being overseen by the culture minister, Frank McAveety, and his advisers… The review will be closely watched by arts organisations in Scotland, and is anticipated with a mixture of nervousness and hope. The closely guarded consultation paper could pave the way for a shake-up of organisations such as the Scottish Arts Council, which administers £60 million in Executive and lottery funds, and Scottish Screen.”

In Detroit, voters and politicians have demonstrated time and time again that they are not interested in a significant public funding program for the arts, and the editorial board at one of the city’s newspapers thinks it knows why. “Cultural leaders should have learned from their election defeats that they’ve not done an adequate job persuading the people that what they offer both enriches individual souls and feeds this community’s comeback.”

City leaders in Cleveland are moving ahead with plans to place a levy on the March ballot with the intention of dedicating a new source of funding to the arts. But there’s a catch: state law prohibits cities of under 500,000 from creating a specific arts district, so Cleveland (population 478,403) must instead use a standard “economic development” levy, which may be used to fund artistic initiatives. The concern with such a non-specific funding plan, of course, is that the ongoing status of the new arts funding would be reliant on the “arts friendliness” of the county commissioners in office at any given time.

After a weekend of staring at images of the humiliated Saddam Hussein, Philip Kennicott ponders the power of images to change how we feel about something. “Images that emerge from photo ops unravel because people tug on the loose threads of their constructedness. His capture, without a fight, no doubt has extraordinary power for the Iraqis who hate him. But the great leader brought low is a more complex image than has yet to be acknowledged.”

Since Canada’s new prime minister named Hélène Chalifour Scherrer to head the country’s culture ministry, cultural groups have been asking Hélène who? She is unknown in the cultural world. “Her very specific interest in amateur sport and the cries of rapture with which the Canadian Olympic Committee greeted her appointment to the portfolio, which does includesport, suggests she may lack the broad vision needed to tackle the large range of regulatory and funding issues that lie at the core of the Canadian Heritage mandate. Comments made to the CBC by her spokesman immediately after her swearing-in about running a “tighter ship” at a ministry that wasn’t going to be a “bank” any more didn’t help.”

When he came to power last February, South Korea’s new President Roh Moo-hyun declared that the 21st Century would be the age of culture and that he would help make it happen. But “like so many other quotes taken from the outspoken chief of nation, the depth of commitment to actually materializing his rhetoric remains questionable, at least after the administration’s unproductive first 10-months of hollow debates, confusions and scarce achievements in cultural policies.”

Wouldn’t you expect a critic to narrow in tastes as the years go on? Surprisingly not, observes Terry Teaachout. “One of the most surprising things that has happened to me in recent years is that I now like far more music, as well as a wider range of interpretative styles, than I did as a young man. This is not at all what I expected to happen as I grew older.”