Category: issues

The latest budget proposal in the California state legislature calls for the elimination of the State Arts Council.

A survey of Chicago foundations reveals that their giving will decline this year. “The survey indicates an average decline in grantmakers’ assets of 15 percent in the most recent fiscal year. But requests for money from non-profits showed no letup. According to the survey, donors are responding by awarding fewer grants, but of somewhat larger amounts. They also are giving more toward general operating expenses, rather than specific programs of non-profits, allowing the groups more flexibility in the use of the funds.”

Last week the French government made rocker Iggy Pop an Officer of Arts and Letters. Really? Iggy’s cool, but is he really a high-cultural luminary worthy of honors from the French Ministry of Culture? “Iggy’s kudos appear to be utterly serious, as part of an attempt to seem as cool as possible. The further out of style a ministry is, the more it must stretch to ‘get game,’ and incongruous results are almost guaranteed. The problem is not uniquely French…”

“Overall corporate giving decreased in 2001, according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel, which will release 2002 estimates Monday. But anecdotal evidence suggests that Philanthropy Inc. is growing again. Despite the struggling economy, many socially responsible companies are not only matching past giving, they’re increasing it.”

“Earlier this week, Utah’s Sen. Orrin Hatch was caught using unlicensed software on his website. While his staff scrambled to fix that problem, Web surfers discovered his site had a link to a pornographic website… To be fair, the dirty link isn’t Hatch’s fault. A lot of expired domain names are being snapped up by porno sites.” Still, the two incidents are being gleefully cited by privacy advocates as further evidence that Hatch’s sweeping pronouncements about destroying the computers of illegal downloaders were ill-conceived and hypocritical.

How do we judge the success of an arts institution? The new heads of London’s National Theatre and the National Gallery – Nicholas Hytner and Charles Saumarez Smith – co-hosted a conference addressing the question of “how we judge whether culture is a success. Both worry that the vocabulary of praise in the arts world has become entirely financial (how many came?) and social (is the work educational? is the audience diverse?). While recognising the importance of these measures, they seek a new language which will recognise the worth a theatre or gallery has simply by existing.”

Israel’s culture budget has been cut nine times in two years. “Economic uncertainty hovers over the nation’s cultural institutes and has grown larger with a new cut in the budget that was passed last week. Announcements about the size of cuts in the culture budget were contradictory. Millions of shekels were added to the budget and were then subtracted with a stroke of the pen.”

Scotland’s culture minister has unveiled his government’s new arts policy, and has ruled out a bailout of the troubled Scottish Opera. “Last month, senior figures in the arts warned that without a substantial cash injection, national companies – notably Scottish Opera – and some theatres might have to cut the number of productions this autumn.”

Earlier this week Utah Senator Orrin Hatch advocated allowing companies to damage computers on which they found copyrighted material that hadn’t been purchased or licensed. It “may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights,” he said, before suggesting that “the technology would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, then destroy their computer.” So take your best shot at Hatch’s own computer. Turns out he uses unlicensed software on his own computer…