Category: issues

It seems like critics are more out of step with audiences than they have been in a long time. Critics’ favorite movies aren’t the big box office hits. Reality TV has captured viewers’ hearts, but not the critics. And pop music critics consistently pick albums and artists that don’t sell well. “So what gives? Should critics really worry about staying in sync with the masses? Should they start grading on a curve?”

Pablo Picasso’s striking anti-war painting ‘Guernica’ hangs at the United Nations in New York, a sobering tapestry greeting visitors to the offices of the U.N. Security Council. But yesterday, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the Security Council, ‘Guernica’ was nowhere to be seen, concealed behind a blue curtain and a row of flags. The U.N. insists that the cover-up was in reponse to the needs of television cameras, but Peter Goddard reports that it “may have been prompted by U.N. realization that images of the mural’s vivid anti-war message were televised world-wide when it appeared as a backdrop to the Jan. 27 interim report by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.”

Increasingly, artists seem to be speaking up about politics and the looming war with Iraq. “I don’t think it’s an accident that in totalitarian societies they always arrest the artists first, though we don’t seem particularly dangerous. I think the responsibility of the artist, each of us in our way, is to tell the truth. And the truth generally involves a great deal of ambiguity, and in times of war ambiguity and paradox are the first things to go. People want simple black and white answers.”

Tech and entertainment industry leaders say they don’t expect new bills On copyright law to be introduced in Congress this year. It’s possible that copyright issues have become become so murky that they lack consensus among various industries and “would keep Congress from acting on significant mandates. Initiatives likely to stall include those requiring electronics firms to install controversial copy-protection devices, restricting peer-to-peer file sharing or expanding the rights of consumers to copy their favorite movies and music.”

Massacusetts’ 62 percent cut in arts funding has had an impact on the state’s arts programs. “How bad are things? The council asked the organizations it funds to detail the effects in a survey. The results: Cuts have eliminated programs, outreach, and jobs. One of the greatest blows is less access for students.”

American state governments are going after arts funding with a vengeance. “In Arizona, where the state Commission on the Arts has received $5.1 million in each of the last two years, a joint legislative committee on Jan. 27 proposed zeroing out that spending in 2003-04. The committee also proposed emptying the state’s $7-million arts endowment and spending the money elsewhere.”

Cultural leaders are predicting that if New Jersey eliminates all its arts funding, as threatened, that 100 cultural organizations could fold. Arts groups would have to slash programs, and many would take a decade to recover. “The 20 to 30 arts leaders who sat through the half-hour meeting told the governor that the impact would go beyond quality-of-life issues.” Studies have shown that the arts annually generates $1 billion in economic activity in New Jersey.

“The Toronto Arts Council yesterday unveiled an ambitious, 10-year program designed to raise the level of awareness of the arts in Toronto and, more important, to put the city’s struggling arts organizations on a more financially stable keel.” A recent study revealed that there is a gap of almost CAN$45 million between what arts groups in the city have, and what they need to function. The new program will create an ambitious and large-scale fundraising structure which will hopefully close that gap by 2012, if all goes according to plan.

Everyone knows that the American economy is in the tank, and that such times call for belt-tightening all around, particularly at non-profits. But John van Rhein is frustrated by the recent slew of defeatist cost-cutting measures at arts institutions across the country. “Arts groups get into trouble once they allow their marketing departments to shape their artistic programs. To pull back and stop taking calculated risks can only be counterproductive in the long run.”

This week, London’s mayor Ken Livingston delivered a proposal for the city’s “cultural strategy.” And…. “I spent a dreary weekend ploughing through ‘London: Cultural Capital’s’ 170-odd pages, all of them replete with the cliches of the current culturespeak. Meaningless pleas for excellence, creativity and access abound. Innocent trees have been felled to provide the paper on which Ken laboriously explains how he wants London to be green and prosperous, and its cultural diversity to be respected. The art of stating the bleeding obvious lives on in strategies and this one is jumping with it. Beyond the waffle, what is proposed?”