Category: issues

The Oregon state legislature is considering zeroing out the state arts commission. Arts commission director Christine D’Arcy says her agency would try to reinvent. “You could see the commission continue as a service agency rather than a grant maker. We?re clearly looking at partnerships, revenue resources. I would say there is a lot of creative thinking under way.”

“In an era when public and private coffers are depleted, it’s easy to ask why arts investment should be a priority.” Real estate consultant Wendi Wheeler writes: “Culture helps build community by influencing commercial and residential development, which in turn attracts workers and residents. When companies make decisions to relocate, they seek markets with concentrations of talented workers. In turn, the power of industry to attract talented workers depends largely upon a city’s quality of life.”

Dana Gioia wants to use his position as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts as an advocate for arts funding. “The arts in America are enormously vital, and I think the public support remains strong. What we are facing right now is a very severe – but temporary – budget crisis for the arts brought on by the recession. On a state level, it looks like we have two hard years to manage through. Luckily from a federal level, the NEA budget [$115 million] has actually grown, and our position in helping state and regional councils will be firm.I see my role in Washington to be a national spokesman for arts funding. … I refuse to believe that arts funding is a controversial issue in the United States.”

The family of an outspoken member of a San Francisco hip hop band says the musician has allegedly been investigated by the US government. “The mother, whom Michale Franti declined to name for her safety, said plainclothes investigators appeared at her door on March 16, showing pictures of the band performing at an anti-war demonstration the previous day in San Francisco, Franti said. They questioned her about entries made in her son’s checking account, his travel records for the past several months, and his general whereabouts.”

Vicki Wolf, longtime director of Sushi, San Diego’s leading cutting-edge performance venue, has resigned. Wolf’s departure, which is said to be motivated by “personal reasons,” leaves Sushi “artistically rudderless at a crucial point in its 24-year history. Sushi’s home, the distinctive and historically designated Carnation Building, has been sold to housing developers who plan to build high-rise condominiums on the footprint where artists now do their work.”

If you can have embedded war correspondents, why not embedded critics? Dominic Papatola investigates a “new” CNN program: “The writer, G. Ima Toady, will receive unprecedented access to the theater’s production process, including rehearsals, literary department briefings, budget meetings and the twice-weekly castigations of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura by artistic director Joe Dowling. The arrangement ‘will allow CNN viewers to view, up-close, the difficult and sometimes bloody process involved in creating theater,’ said Sid Bedingfield, executive editor of the CNN News Group. ‘No journalistic institution has ever been this close to the action’.”

“It is times like these that have prompted John McCain to observe, ‘If Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is a Washington for the simple-minded…’ Everywhere you turn there are sightings of a nationwide backlash against celebrities.” But Frank Rich argues that, while celbrity liberals may seem (and probably are) awfully out-of-touch with reality, the verbal grenades they’re lobbing at the Bush administration aren’t any more absurd than those regularly being heaved the opposite way by folks like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. Furthermore, the backlash isn’t terribly likely to have any lasting effect, and may actual serve to fire up the stagnant left.

No one ever expects war to have a positive effect on a society, but in Israel, where war and violence are as much a part of life as eating and breathing, the arts are becoming a major unintended casualty. The combination of political pressures, frayed public nerves, and economic doldrums are threatening the artistic infrastructure of the region in a fashion which ought to alarm arts advocates worldwide. And yet, in a time when the world, and particularly the Middle East, seems to be perpetually at war, the problem goes largely unnoticed by the larger global community.

When an LA Times columnist derided the California Arts Council as being of little use to real artists last week, arts advocates were stung by the attack. Laura Zucker defends the industry’s reliance on large support and fund-raising staff: “The creation of art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is impossible to separate grants aimed at making art from those that support staff, fund-raising efforts, marketing and technical upgrades. If a wonderful work of sculpture goes unseen because there are no curators to discover it, no access to exhibition space or no marketing plan to advertise and promote the exhibition, what has been accomplished?”

“The arts rarely appeal to a truly diverse audience. Are tastes in multicultural Britain so far apart or is it the same old problem of ‘us’ and ‘them’?” In other words, when is elitism necessary to insure good art, and when does it become an impenetrable dividing line between the cultural haves and have-nots? Liz Hoggard finds that it’s much easier to define the problem than to present any real solutions.