Category: issues

A proposal in the New York state legislature would create culture zones in cities. “The program would provide for designation of culture-zone areas, and calls for tax incentives for owners to improve properties and provide low rents for artists. Local governments would receive the ability to identify specific geographic areas that would benefit from ‘enhancements to the local arts community’.”

The MacDowell Colony is one of about 100 artist colonies in the US that offer refuge for artists. “The 20 or 30 artists in residence at any given time gather each evening at Colony Hall, the large administrative building, for a family-style meal (served promptly at 6:30 p.m.) and informal activities such as pool and ping-pong. Other than breakfast, it’s the only time they are likely to see one another. The rest of the day the “colonists,” as the artists are called, scatter to some 30 studios that dot the rolling, wooded property. There they sculpt, paint, write, design, or compose. They don’t even have to account for how they spend their time.”

Arts festivals, like flashy new museum buildings, can be tourist attractions for communities wanting to reinvent themselves. The Ruhr region in Germany, headquarters for coal, steel and heavy industry, has a new festival and a star to run it. But how do you get people to come? “It will take a long time to convince people to come to the Ruhr, And they won’t come for the Vienna Philharmonic.” So Gerard Mortier, who transformed the Salzburg Festival with new offerings, has put together a season of “23 productions with 129 performances in 15 spaces, along with additional concerts, a fringe festival and what promises to be an astonishing installation of a Bill Viola video spectacle.”

The Australian government has increased its spending on the arts. “Responding to the 2002 Myer inquiry into the contemporary visual arts and craft sector, the Government promised the industry an extra $19.5 million over the next four years. This is the first new funding the sector has received in more than a decade. It will be phased in gradually, rising from $3 million next financial year to $6 million in 2005-06.”

New York cultural groups detail the cuts they will have to make if the city’s proposed budget goes through with arts funding cuts. Closed galleries at city museums, new admission fees… “The report warns in particular that as many as 1,000 staff members would have to be dismissed under the mayor’s budget plan, adding to the 450 jobs already eliminated in the 2002-3 fiscal year.”

Artists in Iraq under Hussein had mixed fortunes. Those in favor were treated well. Those who were suspected for anything were killed or imprisoned. Now artists wonder about the future. “Though they know their agenda is less urgent than restoring electricity or holding elections, the men agreed that Iraq’s cultural rebirth will be crucial if the country is to prosper. There will be a place for Western influence, the men concluded, but they hope it is a tempered one.”

Last year the city of San Jose cut its arts funding 19 percent. This year there’s another 24 percent cut coming. In a city with struggling arts organizations, the news is discouraging.

After the Florida Philharmonic collapse, arts watchers in south Florida are wondering whether the region can support a new $263 million performing arts center, currently under construction. “The issue, arts experts say, is whether the South Florida arts donor base is too narrow: too heavy on the elderly, substantially but not wholly Jewish crowd, often from the Northeast, and too light on young professionals, local Hispanics and wealthy, part-time residents from South America.”

Australia’s artists are waiting for the government budget on Tuesday. Eight months ago, a report on Australia’s visual arts and craft industry “urged the country’s governments to cough up another $15 million a year to help the sector survive. The Federal Government was asked to contribute $9 million of that amount, with the states and territories providing the rest.” Tuesday artists will know if the request has been answered…

Dominic Papatola says the toughest thing about being a critic is surviving the middle. “Working the edges is the most satisfying part of this gig: Any critic who tells you there isn’t perverse fun in writing a really nasty review is either lying to you or so generous he really shouldn’t be in the business. And the experience of a truly sublime night of theater is worth enduring 50 bad ones. But what of those nights that are neither black nor white — the scores and scores and scores of shows that run in a spectrum from pretty bad to pretty good? Those are the ones that will kill you — or burn you out, anyway — and there are lots of them.”