Category: issues

A wide-ranging collection of arts groups and cultural leaders will meet this weekend in Baltimore for the city’s second annual summit meeting on the arts. Mayor Martin O’Malley hosted the first meeting last year, which was billed as a citywide brainstorming session, and which drew 300 artists and activists. This year’s event will focus on ways to make up the national shortfall in arts funding, the future of private giving to the arts, and the omnipresent issue of how to draw out a city’s “creative class.”

For the first time in 12 years, charitable giving in the US was down last year. But cultural groups took a big hit, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “A large, one-time gift in the 2001 fiscal year from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund to two arts and cultural groups in this year’s survey had the effect of causing donations to arts groups to decline steeply last year in percentage terms. The 14 arts organizations in the survey saw their aggregate gifts fall 26.5 percent in 2002. Some arts groups, however, say that they expect to raise at least as much in 2003 as they did last year, in part from capital campaigns.”

The state of California recently called up some major changes to a public art project at the state capitol to make it accessible to those with disabilities. “The cosmic recall, scoffed by some and applauded by others, reflects a growing awareness of disability rights among art and design communities.”

“How do we take what exists in Iraq, how we fortify those institutions, how do we fortify the schools that teach music and art, how do we fortify regional arts organisations and what holes are left? Under Saddam, sculptors got a monthly stipend. They’re not high up on the priority list of people in Iraq, but somebody has to attend to this.”

Support for the arts in Santa Cruz, California has been evaporating. And the city’s artists are leaving. “In the last couple of weeks, not a day has gone by when I haven’t heard of an artist moving away. The Diaspora of young artists here is evaporating because it’s too expensive to live here and because there’s a serious lack of venues in this town.”

The Orange County Register cuts back its arts coverage, cutting its classical music column back from once a week to once a month. “Behind the change, of course, is the thinking that classical music is a marginal art form, patronized by a very few.”

Connecticut creates a “super-agency” of culture that combines all the state’s cultural programs under one roof. “What there is plenty of, are politicos. This could bode well when it comes time to go after significant state dollars beyond the $24.48 million the new agency now oversees this fiscal year ($20 million comes from lodging tax revenues) and at least $20 million for the next; but when it comes to allocating those funds politicians haven’t the best of track records of fairness, merit and accountability.”

In the past decade, a flurry of ambitious lottery-funded attractions went up around the UK. Opened in a blaze of publicity, some of them are now finding the going tougher as they try to earn their way. Can we expect a rash of lottery-funded cultural failures in the next few years?

Peter Herrndorf is an arts turn-around artist. His latest triumph is revitalizing Ottawa’s national Arts Center. And he didn’t do it by playing safe. “The trouble was that as money got tighter through the nineties, people [within the NAC] became risk-averse, and this is an organization where you want the sensibility to be exactly the opposite. We’re going through a fascinating experiment. We’re trying to take an organization and say it will play an important national role, not in rhetorical terms, but in its ability to support arts organizations in different regions and to build communities and have this organization raise funding across the country.”

This year’s Melbourne Festival comes to a close. “Festival-goers could take their pick of about 70 offerings this year, but it seemed that most wanted to talk about just two of them: the public program Dancing In The Streets and the controversial Belgian production I Am Blood. The former was roundly judged a success, having attracted nightly crowds averaging about 1000 to dance classes at Federation Square, many of them people who had never attended a festival event. But Jan Fabre’s bloody meditation upon humanity’s inhumanity won few fans.”