Category: issues

Completing its gutting of the Colorado Coucil on the Arts, the CCA’s director was fired Friday. “The action effectively completes the elimination of the current CCA staff, a move that could also cost the state an additional $614,000 in federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts because it only distributes its grants through viably functioning state arts councils. On Wednesday, Owens ordered that no more than $40,000 of the council’s 2003-04 budget of $814,000 could be spent on payroll, utilities and all other operational costs. A year ago, the office had seven staff members, each making more than $40,000, Holden said. Since then, the CCA’s state funding has been cut from $1.9 million to $200,000, and the staff had been cut to three even before Friday.”

Liverpool isn’t the capital of anything, least of all culture. “Nobody can seriously hold that Liverpool has more ‘cultural assets’ than London, Edinburgh, Manchester or Birmingham. Its theatres, galleries and museums do not outrank theirs. Liverpool had The Beatles, the beat poets, a river front and fine buildings which the city fathers have so far failed to demolish. But everyone has left who was not screwed to the floor. Liverpudlians are legendarily cussed and given to drinking. That is not culture. Nor can London’s army of Scousers talk: why are they reading this and not back home saving their city and reading the Post?”

Liverpool has been a blighted hulk for a long time. Now it’s been named the European Capital of Culture, and maybe that will help pick up the city and return it to its former glory. “A hundred years ago the city was the gateway to the empire, the port from which nine million emigrants sailed off to the promised lands of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” It was then “Britain’s only really multicultural city which teemed with Lascar seamen from the Indies, the descendants of African and Black American sailors, Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and the largest Chinatown in Europe. It was a city with its back turned against the land, one which barely inhabited the country it was nominally part of.”

First Colorado Governor Bill Owens is instrumental is slashing the state’s arts budget from $1.9 million to $200,000. Now Owens is telling the arts council that it mustn’t spend the money on itself. “Currently, he said, 82 percent – $165,000 – is allotted to infrastructure. Owens asked that only $40,000 be used.”

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a “self- proclaimed champion of the arts,” has hundreds of artists mad at him. He’s proposed expanding his Oakland School for the Arts, but he wants to expand it into a building that already houses artists, and the plan would evict them. “To displace working artists who are serving thousands of kids and adults for a school for the arts that will serve maybe 400 students at most is perverse. It makes no sense.”

Arts education in public schools in New York City is haphazard.”It’s completely hodgepodge. We have in some schools almost no arts, in many schools no music, schools that are not taking advantage of the cultural resources of the city, arts educators who may be asked to decorate the school for Halloween.” Now the schools chancellor has proposed a standardized arts regime for the city.

The San Francisco Symphony has been running its Adventures in Music education program for 10 years. So it’s time to evaluate. “Among the findings: 86.9 percent of teachers and 85.5 of principals said students are more interested in music and the arts because of AIM; 68 percent of teachers interviewed said participating in AIM helped them find new ways of thinking about curriculum; and 58 percent said they believed the program made them better teachers.”

“Liverpool has been named European Capital of Culture 2008 by UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The city beat five other hopefuls – Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle-Gateshead and Oxford – to win the coveted prize… The renewal of its waterfront, a World Heritage site, and cultural centres like Tate Liverpool strengthened its credentials. It is also home to the recently opened Film Arts and Creative Centre, FACT, the UK’s only exhibition and performance space dedicated to film, video and digital art.” The award is likely to generate some much-needed tourism dolllars for Liverpool, which is promising to mount a year-long festival of the arts.

An arts organization’s biggest asset? Its volunteers. “Anyone who believed the media coverage of the arts might end up thinking that they were a haven for fat cats on inflated salaries, cushioned by state subsidy and Lottery grants. Talk to anyone who actually works for your local theatre, art gallery or stately home and you begin to see a more heartening picture of goodwill and altruistic dedication to the play, the music, the paintings. Every volunteer is a romantic at heart, hoping to be brushed by stardust.”

A proposal before Congress would force foundations to cover their administrative costs outside the five percent of their assets they’re required to give away each year. “Foundation execs are in a flutter. They see the bill as a threat to the immortality of their institution, and perhaps of their founders’ names. In their view, the bill demands that they either cut costs to the bone (at the expense of more difficult or adventurous projects) or go extinct. Susan Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation, has said the bill will force foundations “to eat into capital and the country will lose these… public assets for the common good’.”