Category: issues

“The position of marketing in the arts is not and never has been a sufficiently high priority. There is an old saying that if a show is successful, it is great art; if it fails, it is bad marketing. To market the arts means you have to accept that it is a product like everything else – obviously not something that sits well with some artists.”

The Zagat restaurant guide has branched into rating culture in a big way. “For the Zagats, the new surveys offer a chance to satisfy an A-list of recent investors who would like to see revenues keep growing at a time when the restaurant guides have all but blanketed the country. For Broadway, Hollywood and the music world, the new guides could lend statistical proof to the old lament that the public appreciates some work far more than the critics do. For the culture as a whole, the guides are yet another way that public opinion, once it has been measured and disseminated, is now doubling back to influence the public itself.”

Iraq’s artists are having a tough time. “Funding the arts may seem like a luxury in a country where many families still lack dependable access to clean water. But if the US is serious about building a model Middle Eastern democracy in Iraq, say some experts, it’s going to have to rebuild the country’s intellectual infrastructure as well as its buildings and roads.”

David Hinckley is getting sick of the whole nudity thing. Don’t pretend you don’t know what he’s talking about, either: at some point in the last few years, it seems as if the entire pop culture universe just decided to get naked, or damn near naked, and strut around for all the world to admire. It’s getting old, and Hinckley would like everyone to put their clothes back on, please. Now.

In the 90s Hoston was the hot, hip area of London, the “playground” of the YBA artists. “But now there are whispers that Hoxton is on the way down. Popularity, they say, has killed personality. Overexposure has destroyed the sense of Hoxton as an exclusive club for the ultra- fashionable: on a Saturday night, the Hoxton-Shoreditch thoroughfare of Curtain Road has lost any sense of an alternative identity, and the Bacardi Breezer-drinking hordes are indistinguishable from those in the West End.”

Director Peter Sellars is impressed with demonstrations against the war in Iraq, but under no illusions that American policy will soon change. “We have different timelines. I’m accepting that for the next few years the headlines belong to [US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld. Our job as artists is to work for the next twenty years. I’m under no illusion that anything happens overnight. The real work is long-term. I have just come from Glyndebourne, working on Idonomeo and Theodora. These are pieces by artists from two different generations, Mozart and Handel, who were putting forward ideas – the end of autocracy and so on – that became the American revolution. That’s what artists must do.”

Science museums are generally kid-oriented institutions, featuring the type of whiz-bang exhibits a 10-year-old is guaranteed to prefer to sitting in math class. But a new science museum in London is aiming its marketing strategy squarely at the city’s adult population, with exhibits and panel discussions on some of the most controversial scientific issues of the era. “Be it the implications of genetically modified foods, face transplants, sex over 60, male pregnancy, death or AIDS, the Dana Centre plans to tackle topical, and sometimes taboo, subjects.”

“The years have dulled Mickey’s personality, a result of him becoming the corporate face of a multibillion-dollar entertainment empire. In the process, Mickey also has become a cultural Rorschach test — a symbol of American optimism, resourcefulness and energy or an icon of cultural commodification and corporate imperialism.”

State support for the arts in California is low, after recent budget cuts. How low? “To better understand how low public support has sunk, consider that Canadians spend an annual $145 per capita to fund the arts; Germans, $85; New Yorkers, $2.75; Mississippians, $1.31; Californians, 3 cents. ‘That’s gum balls,’ says Barry Hessenius, director of the council. Three gum balls a year.”

In a speech, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm apologizes for declining state support for the arts. “About this disconnect between art and politics: It is true that politics ends up flattening down the artistic edge. For in this line of work, you are either a zero or a sum. You are a Democrat or a Republican. You are pro-this or anti-that. There is little room to be nuanced, textured, deep or subtle. So, I think that we just ought to elect more artists. Not just wrestlers and movie stars, either, but musicians and painters, dancers, filmmakers and poets. Just don’t run for governor for another 7 years.”