Category: issues

All that wrangling about how Lincoln Center would get a $1.5 billion makeover seems so far awaay now. “Now the City Opera has decided to move downtown. Avery Fisher Hall is likely to be renovated rather than rebuilt. New York City, in perilous fiscal straits, appears unlikely to be able to fulfill the $240 million pledge that Rudolph W. Giuliani made for the project when he was mayor. The private sector is feeling the economic pinch before fund-raising has even begun. What’s left of the redevelopment project? What part of it can Lincoln Center hope to accomplish? With the economic downturn, all the grand plans now seem like pipe dreams. The 11 private and public groups involved in the redevelopment have been forced to reassess.”

A professor at Seoul National Universityt laments that the humanities are not being studied in Korea. Humanities and literature have turned to ‘cultural studies’ that emphasize the interrelationship of ethnic identities, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and film studies. This means that the humanities and literature are now almost always explored and discussed in relation to their cultural and social implications, hegemony, ideology, and history. In many countries this cultural approach seems to succeed, at least partially, in bringing students’ interest back to the humanities and literature. But alas! Not in Korea, where highbrow culture and traditional values are esteemed more than any other country on earth.

The Vatican is apparently ready to name Saint Isidore of Seville as patron saint of the internet. The Pope alone may name a patron saint, but St Isidore is receiving stiff opposition from Archangel Gabriel and Saint Alfonso Maa de Liguori, an 18th century poet.” So just who is St. Isadore?…

The financially-strapped Adelaise Festival has thrown itself on the mercy of the state government asking “for debts of about $1.2 million to be forgiven, and seeking additional cash, which it would match with corporate investment or other festival sponsorship. The total budget is likely to be close to $5 million, short of the $8 million spent by Peter Sellars last year. Without it, [the festival says] it will be impossible to provide the level of programming needed to shore up the festival’s reputation – tarnished by community dismay at Sellars’s determinedly radical event.”

Miami is building a new $265-million Performing Arts Center with a 2,200-seat symphony hall, a 2,480-seat ballet opera house and a 200-seat studio theater. Plans to fill the hall are grandly ambitious, envisioning a flowering of arts and culture that will benefit the region for years to come. “But can we afford it? With the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the PAC’s crucial five resident companies, already threatening bankruptcy, a disturbing question is raised: Even after the center’s construction is paid for, can South Florida come up with the money to run it?”

“Where once emigre artists coming to America headed for New York, now they seem to be landing in Los Angeles. “You can’t prove it through government stats (the bureaucracies don’t track artist émigrés), but the city’s curators, gallery owners and the artists themselves are convinced that a new wave of foreign-born ‘beginner’ types is showing up in L.A. for art’s sake. New York has remained the marketing center for visual arts, but L.A. has taken over as the production center.”

Forty percent of the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts – $116.5 million this fiscal year – goes directly to state arts agencies, which then pass most of it on to local arts groups and projects. But what happens if states eliminate their arts agencies? “By law we cannot write a check if there is no agency to write a check to,” says NEA chief Dana Gioia.

Americans rush to lock up the rights to anything. “So it’s only natural that, by last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had received 26 applications for the use of ‘shock and awe’ for everything from hot sauces to bath toys.”

“In the past year’s budget, New York spent more than any other state on the arts, $44.4 million. Now, with the state arguably facing the biggest budget crisis since the Depression, Governor George Pataki proposes to trim grants to arts organizations by 15 percent, to about $37.8 million. But critics want deeper cuts.”

States are slashing arts funding. So are cities. This week the San Jose City Council revealed that “grants for 2003-04 would drop 24 percent below last year’s, to a total of $2.54 million.”