Category: issues

Should politicians who support the arts be trying to raise campaign money from the arts community? Connecticut’s governor, an arts supporter, recently solicited the attendance of arts groups for a $250/plate fundraiser. “He calls and says, ‘I’m having a fund-raiser for Gov. Rowland and I’d like to see you there.’ There’s pressure to attend.” Some feel coerced.

Bernard Holland goes through his files of reader letters over the past six years. “Critics open their mail with a blend of gratitude (someone cared enough) and apprehension (we have been found out), but most will recognize an imbalance of justice at work. Reviews and columns come, potentially at least, before many eyes; the letter reaches only two. Yet when accurately aimed, it can hurt. The accusation might concern a wrong name or an unnoticed change of cast, or a fact just plain wrong. If writing accepts the privilege of public exposure, it cannot flinch from the returns of service whizzing back at it in swift postal forehands and backhands. Hovering just beyond this building lurk the grammar gestapo and the spelling storm troopers, issuing postcards in wavering hands and eager to point out the illiteracy of the addressee.”

1000 Minnesota artists and arts advocates descended on the state capitol in St. Paul this week to lobby legislators to amend Governor Tim Pawlenty’s plan to cut arts funding 22%. The state faces a $4.23 billion deficit for the next biennium, and the governor has pledged not to raise taxes or cut K-12 education spending, making cuts in all other areas a near-certainty. The annual arts lobbying event had never before drawn more than 400 attendees, and legislators were largely receptive, if somewhat skeptical of their ability to spare the arts from the budget knife.

That gale-force wind that just rushed up from the Northeast was the Massachusetts Cultural Council letting out its collective breath. The MCC, which saw its budget slashed 62% last year by acting governor Jane Swift, will apparently face no further cuts this fiscal year. Governor Mitt Romney’s new budget restores none of last year’s cuts to the MCC, but neither does it trim the council further. “The fact that Romney’s education adviser Peter Nessen also chairs the MCC board likely bodes well for the organization.” The MCC’s annual budget now stands at a proposed $7.3 million.

It now costs £5 to drive into the center of London. But officials at one museum were surprised to get notice of a fine for the museum’s 105-year-old Daimler that has not been on the road since 1947. “We were surprised to get the paperwork because the Daimler has not moved under its own power for decades,” said Andrew King, curator of the Bristol Industrial Museum, where the car has been on display for 25 years.”

A former Scottish tourism chief says Scotland’s failure to invest in the arts will hurt the country’s economy. “As soon as an arts organisation looks for money, it is described as eating up money for a group of people who can well afford the ticket price. That view has far too much credence in government and needs to be challenged; government needs to identify the arts as an important component of what we are as human beings. Instead every penny towards the arts is questioned, almost begrudged.”

A recent report by the Boston Foundation said that 65 percent of arts donations went to two percent of the area’s cultural organizations – the ones with budgets of more than $20 million. This has led some to call for spreading the wealth among the rest of the arts organizations. But leaders of two of Boston’s largest arts groups say the portion of funding for major groups is right because they serve the widest audiences. “That chart doesn’t show audience served. That’s the number one point.”

In Milwaukee, plans for a major work of public art by sculptor Dennis Oppenheim have been shelved after a public outcry against the decidedly modernist piece. James Auer is disappointed by the plan’s defeat, but thinks he knows what the problem was – lack of proper salesmanship. “Perhaps we can retreat, regroup and give some thought to a few general rules about introducing a major work of art by a top talent to a public that is wary of modernism in general and conceptualism in particular.” Auer specifically suggests involving the local media early on in the process, rather than making formal announcements about new artworks which have already been approved.

Why are the nation’s governors and legislatures talking about zeroing out (or at least severely slashing) arts funding, when such cuts will be less than a drop in the bucket of spending cuts and tax increases most states will need to balance their bloated budgets this year? The arts are always a popular target for conservative policymakers, but on a fiscal level, the proposed cuts make no sense. Not only does public support of the arts tend to result in more money flowing back into state and local coffers than going out, but the cuts will, in the long run, likely have a negative impact on the economic quality of life in the affected states.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is reinventing former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s so-called “Decency Council” – the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. “The commission, largely ignored in recent years, was reconstituted by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a decency panel in April 2001 after the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibited works he found offensive. But Bloomberg apparently has another model in mind: a ‘working board’ full of established art enthusiasts, some of whom just might write out a hefty check in a pinch.”