Category: issues

A new study says that “regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV. Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history’s hall of fame. The energy of youth and the dampening effect of marriage, are also remarkably similar among geniuses in music, painting and writing, as well as in criminal activity.”

A new generation of cell phones allows users to point and click their phones on hyperlinks in the real world. In museums “visitors could download high-quality audio and visual content about exhibits. Tourists could retrieve sightseeing information as they walk through a city. Users could even leave contact details like their e-mail addresses to receive updates on events, exhibitions or special offers.”

The Melbourne Festival is suddenly without a sponsor for the first time in years. “The festival organisers are also uncertain if the State Government will maintain its support at $6.6 million next year. The 2004 festival will celebrate opera, which demands that companies be booked early to fit into international schedules. The funding uncertainty is making this difficult.”

It won’t come as a surprise to any arts organization which has tried to mount a major fund-raising campaign in the last year, but the Smithsonian is facing a rather severe drop in donations. “In the six months ending in March, the Smithsonian raised $51 million. In the same period a year earlier it brought in $117 million — including $10 million gifts from Lockheed Martin, General Motors and the James S. McDonnell Charitable Trust. But even without $30 million in major single gifts, the fundraising is down $36 million.” Officials at the nation’s largest museum complex are staying upbeat, however, saying that they believe the drop to be a temporary problem.

A new survey of Canadian culture reveals that the dollar value of Canada’s ‘cultural exports’ last year was a record CAN$2.3 billion, with U.S. consumers accounting for 96% of that purchase total. But Canada’s cultural import business grew even more, despite the insistence of Canadian citizens that they want to buy home-grown. (The U.S. is the culture-gobbling villain in this equation, too.) The Canadian publishing industry was hardest hit by the lack of import-export balance, and the only corner of the arts not badly affected was the film industry.

France’s Avignon Festival has been called off, with no end in sight to the strike by the nation’s arts workers. “The opening days’ events were cancelled, but organisers had hoped to salvage the later stages. Those hopes were dashed early on Thursday, when actors voted to continue their strike, dealing a fatal blow to the event.” Avignon was to have run for three weeks.

Striking French arts workers shut down shooting on a Jack Nicholson movie in Paris (after meeting with strikers, Nicholson expressed his solidarity) and closed the Avignon Festival for a second day. “At the Avignon festival in southern France, organizers said the remainder of the three-week event – which draws 700,000 people a year for round-the-clock theater performances – will be decided each day the strike continues. They say they stand to lose $3.7 million in ticket sales alone if the event is called off.”

Britain’s lottery has funded dozens of major arts projects, and its supporters celebrate its remaking of the country’s cultural scene in the past decade. But the lottery’s success is rather more mixed than that, writes Norman Lebrecht. “Those lottery schemes which have indeed ‘made Britain a better place’ are the ones which would have happened anyway, but where a modest application of lottery lubricant facilitated a triumphant resurgence.”

Nuns of Mother’s Teresa’s order are trying to file a copyright on use of her name and insignia. “In her lifetime, Mother Teresa expressed on a number of occasions her wish that her name not be used by any other individual or organisation without her permission, or after her death, the permission of her successor, the Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity.”