Category: issues

The Canada Council is asking for a big increase in its funding. “Over the past three years, artists and arts organizations in 1,000 Canadian communities have received Canada Council funding. In 2002-2003, the Council awarded nearly $142.3-million in grants, prizes and payments to Canadian artists and arts organizations.”

Plans for a new $250 million performing arts center for Dallas have been released. “For a document co-produced by the offices of Rem Koolhaas and Foster and Partners, spirited iconoclasts and high-tech adventurers respectively, it is surprisingly conventional. Leafy boulevards, fountained plazas, long axial vistas, these are the staples of old world urbanism rather than the concussive New American landscape. And for a plan that’s been in the works for a year, it is surprisingly sketchy. The sources of this embryonic condition are various: an inexperienced client, philosophical differences among the planners, an untimely shakeup in Mr. Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture.”

Kenneth Foster has been appointed director of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center. “Foster, 52, comes to the Bay Area from Tucson, where for the past nine years he directed UA Presents, the University of Arizona’s performing arts program. There his duties paralleled those he will take up at Yerba Buena: programming leadership, audience development, fund-raising, budget oversight and staff management.”

Is Richard Florida’s “Rise of The Creative Class” really about art? “It’s not just that Florida relies on words like ‘funky’ and ‘eclectic’ to describe art scenes – words that tend to signal a passive enjoyment of the scene rather than genuine interest in art itself. Or that someone devoted to creative thinking uses empty phrases like ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘pushing the envelope’ instead of proposing real innovations. It’s true that Creative Class is dedicated more to a dissection of the economic situation rather than solutions for creating what Florida calls ‘people climates’ – that is, the kind of place that these creative-class types would like to live. But Florida tends to glide over the solutions (as well as some of the more outstanding problems) with vague recommendations such as ‘invest broadly in arts and culture,’ an idea he puts right up there with tax breaks for technology companies.”

There is a group of people who have burrowed in to Disneyland and plan their lives around it. They “talk a lot about the Magic of Disneyland, that wonderful, childlike feeling of giving in to this world that Walt created, of letting the place make you happy. They want to hold on to that magic and feel it all the time, but it’s perhaps not as easy as when they actually were children. And so they become Talmudic. They go deep inside the history of Disneyland, study every inch of it.”

“Girl culture” seems to be back as a force. “But what exactly is girl culture? On one hand, it’s a shared set of values and behaviors among girls in their teens, ‘tweens and early 20s. It’s directly affected by consumerism, body image, mass media and the cosmetic, fashion and entertainment industries. Teen girls have tremendous pocketbook power, and companies are eager to tap into that exploding market. On the other hand, girl culture is also a resistance – rooted in 1960s and ’70s feminism – to all those forces.”

Visible sponsorships of cultural events by tobacco companies (read: money for advertising) is over. “Whatever the individual solutions, the cultural community is largely resigned to the loss of tobacco money. In the past, some arts administrators did question the ethics of tobacco sponsorships; many others wondered why the federal government allowed itself to benefit from cigarette taxes but wouldn’t let the arts take its share of the blood money. It’s been a difficult debate in which anyone with a doctrinaire position, whether it was in favour of commercial free speech or rabidly anti-smoking, didn’t seem to be addressing the complexity of the issue in an age when governments know smoking is deadly but also recognize they can’t criminalize it.”

Baltimore is revitalizing an old 2,300-seat theatre, hoping to book some of the touring shows that bypass the city. The city’s leaders are hoping that “the Hippodrome will do for Baltimore what Harborplace and Oriole Park did in the 1980s and ’90s: catalyze economic development and attract thousands of people to the city, thus literally setting the stage for renewal of Baltimore’s once bustling retail district. So far, the city’s cultural gambit appears to be paying off.”

Arts organizations often find themselves in cash-flow difficulty, only to find banks reluctant to loan them money. “Low-budget arts companies in metro Atlanta can now apply to borrow from a new pool of money supplied by the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund. The fund, which makes annual grants to nonprofit groups in a 23-county area, has announced that it is making $200,000 of its $6.5 million endowment available for an Arts Loan Fund.”

In Canada a new ban on tobacco advertising has arts groups worried that they’ll lose some major sponsoships. But at least one of the big tobacco companies – Imperial Tobacco – “has decided to keep funding the arts, despite a new federal law that bans tobacco advertising.”