Category: issues

Do artists have the right to use images of celebrities in their work? The California Supreme Court says yes. “The court said celebrities have the right to prevent their likenesses from being used simply to sell products, a doctrine illustrated by a 2001 ruling against an artist who sold T-shirts and lithographs with drawings of the Three Stooges. But in a unanimous decision, the justices said artists and publishers have a constitutional right to produce works that include an image, creatively transformed, of an actual person.”

“The decision permits authors of fictional works to create characters based in part on celebrities, as long as the portrayals differ from the real people. Celebrities will continue to be able to demand compensation when their actual faces or names are used on coffee cups or other commercial merchandise.”

“It’s going on two years now, and the work is just beginning. Artists found a daunting, inevitable theme for the 21st century in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A spate of recent works — in film, fiction, music and poetry — suggests how broad and multivalenced the responses will be as this singular national trauma continues to sink in and penetrate our consciousness.”

A collection of celebrity musicians is calling for drastic cuts to the European Union’s “Value Added Tax” (VAT) on CDs and other recorded media, to bring the tax rate in line with what consumers pay for newspapers, books, and concert tickets. The VAT is similar to U.S. sales tax, and just as a state may set its own sales tax, an EU nation may determine its own VAT rate on a variety of products. VAT tax on CDs runs between 15% and 25%, while the rate on books is closer to 5%.

Which American city is tops in the arts? If you said New York, you’re wrong. At least according to AmericanStyle magazine. The Magazine ranks America’s best arts cities. “The survey – something less than scientific, since its results are based on reader votes – purports to show that the Midwest is emerging as a new area of artistic influence. Chicago, for example, moved up to No. 1 from its No. 5 position in 2002. And newcomers in the top 25 include Milwaukee and Columbus, with Cleveland returning to the list for the first time since 1998.”

Building a new performing arts center is only the beginning. After it’s beuilt you have to invest money on what goes inside it. Mangers of the new Miami Dade performing arts center in Florida project it will take a $100 million to get programming and resident companies on sound footing once the hall opens. With the Florida Philharmonic recently imploding, some wonder if the community is ready to step up and make the investment required.

There’s an idea that culture can be used to “revive declining places, and the idea of urban living in general.” But does it really work? “The origins of this vigorous, commercially-driven view of culture in cities are in the wider free-market revolution of the 70s and 80s. Large, abandoned city buildings have been converted into cultural facilities at least since the French Revolution, when artists took over empty churches and mansions. But the idea that such conversions should be centrepieces of urban renewal only took root, in Britain at least, with the discovery of the ‘inner city’ as a political issue in the late 70s and the growing official reluctance to address its problems through more traditional, and expensive, social reforms.”

Surprising just about everyone last fall, the Bush administration decided the US should rejoin UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency. “The American contribution will be the first since 1984, when the US withdrew in protest against mismanagement, corruption, and Third World bias.” How to interpret the move? “A careful analysis of statements made by administration officials and other politicians reveals that far from being a move towards multilateral collaboration, the decision to rejoin the organisation is seen by the Bush administration as simply another weapon in the US war on terror.”

Just as the Montana state legislature was closing its session, it passed an amendment that canceled $100,000 from the Montana Arts Council budget and transfered it to fund an emergency medical communications system.

After the Florida legislature hacked down the state’s arts budget, “all across South Florida, arts groups are tallying their potential losses, which range from $1,500 to more than $500,000 per year. The fallout will include delayed construction projects, reduced services and, perhaps most damaging in the long run, cutbacks in educational programs for children. ‘We can no longer count on state arts funds as a part of our annual operating budget. Because the grants are non-recurring and the trust funds are eliminated, we would do ourselves a fiscal disservice to rely on the state’.”