Category: issues

In America, state budget season has ended for another year, and the arts didn’t make out very well. “State art spending dropped from $409 million in fiscal year 2002 to $355 million in 2003, and, with State deficits projected to balloon from $60 million to $80 billion this year, arts funding will fall another 23%, bringing the 2004 total to around $274 million.”

Last year Rolex initiated a program of arts mentorships, placing outstanding younger artists with older star qartists. “It began with a star-studded advisory board that included Frank Gehry, Christo and Jean-Claude, and Jessye Norman. Then the company arranged for nominations to be made by distinguished panelists working in anonymity, choosing potential protégés from a pool of 96 candidates in 39 countries. There was prize money, too: $50,000 for the mentors and a $25,000 stipend for the protégés. And of course, a Rolex watch for each.”

America’s performing arts service organizations are planning their first-ever joint meeting. “At the First National Performing Arts Convention, to be held in Pittsburgh June 8-13, groups such as OPERA America, Theatre Communications Group, Dance/USA, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre will hold their own meetings and also gather together to address topics including arts research, audience development, arts education, governance and ethics, arts journalism and new-work development.”

Toronto is electing a new mayor, and the five major candidates for the office gathered to talk about the arts. “The first Great Toronto Arts Debate was refreshingly free of all that embarrassing ‘world-class city’ rhetoric that has marked civic politics since the eighties.” And there was acknowledgment that the arts were important for the city’s future. But what does that mean, exactly?

The US is about to introduce a new $20 bill. To acquaint the public with the new-look money, the government is spending “$33 million on advertising, marketing and education programs to promote the new bill, and it has hired a public relations firm and, in a first, a product placement firm and one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies to put the $20 bill on the publicity circuit. By the time the new bill joins the currency flow next month, it will have appeared virtually everywhere but on the ballot for California’s recall election.”

Playwright Tony Kushner on the responsibility of artists in challenging time: “You can’t find any important work of American art, in theater or anywhere else, that doesn’t have a very powerful political dimension. [But] whatever you do with your day job—and writing plays is what I do—is no replacement for activism, which is a necessary part of being a citizen in a democracy.”

In his short time in power, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has led his country in what some call a leftist revolution, and what others call a needless class war. As clashes between Chávez supporters and opponents intensify, the nation’s artists have found themselves in unexpected conflict with each other. “Once faithfully leftist and mostly detached from political life, Venezuela’s modern art community is now deeply divided over Chávez and his populist program. A new brand of political art has emerged in Caracas, produced by acclaimed painters best known for vast abstract canvases and murals. In recent months, the protest that has played out in a haze of tear gas has become clearly visible in paintings.”

As cities go, Detroit does not have a good reputation. Decades of urban blight and civic mismanagement left the city in a hole which it has only recently begun to climb out of. But when the Detroit Symphony opens its new $60 million expansion of Orchestra Hall this week, it will represent the latest push by the community to revitalize the urban core. For the DSO, the project means a chance to continue playing downtown, and to do so in one of the finest performance complexes in the nation. For the project’s major benefactor, who admits that he was never much of a music fan, it means an opportunity to jumpstart the turnaround in one of Detroit’s most blighted neighborhoods.

Experts are coming to agreement that the only way to save Venice from flooding is to build large gates to keep high water out of Venice’s lagoon. “The nearly €3 billion ($3.4 billion) scheme will comprise about 80 hollow gates embedded in the seabed at the three inlets to Venice’s lagoon. When not needed, the gates will rest on the seabed, full of water. But when high tides threaten the city, compressed air will force water out of the gates. This will cause them to rise and act as a barrier to water trying to enter the lagoon. Will the gates justify their large cost?”

In the old Soviet Union, “culture was a matter for the central committee and the Politburo. What kind of modern art should be allowed? Was jazz decadent? Which foreign plays should be staged? Even to pose these questions was all but unimaginable in the West; yet they were matters of state in the East. When Nikita Khrushchev, in a moment of notorious philistinism, denounced abstract modern painting during a visit to the Manezh gallery in Moscow in 1962, it changed the future course of Soviet art, breaking countless careers in the process. What Richard Nixon, LBJ or Harold Macmillan may—or may not—have thought about modern art was hardly a scratch on the canvas.”