Category: issues

The Long Beach, California city arts commission may go out business after deep cuts in its funding. The 27-year-old arts agency “has a 10-member staff that helps administer the grants, after-school activities, neighborhood arts programs and Smithsonian Week, which brings in national scholars once a year.”

There was a time when young architects and designers considered it their civic duty to put some time and effort into creating affordable housing and shelter for the dispossessed. But by the late ’90s, “these concerns had given way to a preoccupation with signature design and theory.” Enter Cameron Sinclair, a 29-year-old designer determined to return the notion of large-scale community service to prominence within his profession.

Canada’s duMaurier Arts Council doles out $2 million a year in grants to arts groups which otherwise might go unfunded. But the council, which is funded entirely by the Imperial Tobacco company, is about to be shut down, thanks to new restrictions on tobacco advertising by the federal government. “In what is widely being viewed in the arts community as one last, concerted effort by Imperial to shame the federal government into backing down on the advertising ban, the company issued a news release yesterday. It ran more than four pages and detailed, community by community, the $60 million the tobacco company has pumped into the arts through the council since 1971.”

San Jose is considering privatizing the management of the city’s public theatres. The city’s arts groups are concerned. “In light of a $4 million loss at the city-run McEnery Convention Center in 2002, the mayor’s office sees privatization as a possible way to run the buildings more efficiently. However, the Mayor’s Budget Message Task Force, an ad hoc advisory committee of representatives from local arts groups, has urged the city to consider the impact on local groups as well the bottom line when determining who will manage the facilities.”

New York’s 92nd Street Y, a mainstay of the city’s culture and a fixture on the upper East Side, is considering a downtown branch at the site of the Wolrd Trade Center. “The Y is talking with several other organizations, including the New York City Opera, the Joyce Theater, the Tribeca Film Festival and Hunter College about sharing space in the performing arts center designated for the World Trade Center site or in other locations nearby. ‘We want to be a central part of a wheel out of which many spokes come’.”

The Eternal City seems like a paradise to outsiders. Art, food, beauty. But “it is virtually impossible to earn a living. To live here with a minimum of dignity (renting a small flat, eating out occasionally, but no car and no proper holidays), you need a good 3,000 euros a month pre-tax, say 1,800 euros post-tax (roughly £2,100 and £1,250 respectively). However modest this seems, it is not what you will get. While in the Anglo-Saxon world most adults expect to be able to live independently off their salaries, in Italy most don’t. They stay with their families. Indeed, a staggering 70 per cent of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live in subsidised comfort at home, where their meagre earnings do very nicely as pocket money.”

Sir Colin Southgate steps down as chairman of Covent Garden after a tumultuous five years. “In February 1998, when Southgate was parachuted in by Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary, it seemed unlikely that there would be a Royal Opera House left for anyone to visit. The builders had been in for almost two years, their costs were soaring towards £214 million and the imposition of a businessman outsider was generally believed to be the Government’s last throw before merging Covent Garden with English National Opera and disbanding the orchestra.”

The Edinburgh Festivals are in a “golden age” and sold more than a million tickets this year for the first time. “The figures capped an exceptional month for the organisers, who have overseen one of the most vibrant events for years, and witnessed a growing acceptance among politicians of the need to consider strategic public investment in it.”

What’s up with all the monuments to the Ten Commandments around America? How come there are so many of them? “In the 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille teamed with the Fraternal Order of Eagles to kick off donations of 4,000 6-foot granite tablets depicting the Ten Commandments to municipalities nationwide. For DeMille, this was great advertising for his epic movie ‘The Ten Commandments.’ The Eagles, which kept the program going at least into the 1960s, declared it a way to fight juvenile delinquency.”

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival attracted record audiences this year. “On the final day of the three-week arts festival, organisers said 1,184,738 tickets had been sold, which represented a 21% increase on 2002 when 975,110 were sold. Income rose to £9,386,003, compared to £7,688,113 last year. The festival offered 21,000 performances of 1,541 shows in 207 venues.”