Category: issues

Frank Johnson goes to the ballet at Covent Garden and is amused at the buzz generated by a pair of celebrities in the audience. “It is not easy for people from popular culture to impress, amuse or interest people gathered for purposes of high culture. They must make us pleased that they share our pleasures or are taking the trouble to try them. Celebrity is not the same as fame. Posh and Becks are celebrities. So is — to choose just another example from popular culture — Sir Elton John. Miss Hurley, say, is just famous. Her presence at Covent Garden would interest, but not fascinate or delight, us.”

New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey has proposed elimination of the state’s entire spending on the arts – $31.7 million in cultural funding in next year’s budget. Cuts include “all $18 million from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts budget, as well as $3.7 million from the historical commission and the next $10 million installment for the New Jersey Cultural Trust, a public-private partnership meant to stabilize struggling cultural groups.” Cultural groups are stunned: “We went to our own funeral today. We understand the fiscal crisis facing New Jersey. What we don’t understand or accept is why we are being singled out (and) … eliminated.”

LA Times art critic Christopher Knight recently began a review with the sentence: “The imbecilic plan for war with Iraq currently on offer from the Bush administration has yet to register much support from the American public.” Predictably, letters protesting Knight’s expression of a political opinion landed at the newspaper. Should a critic mix his political point of view with his judgment of art? Does it weaken the criticism?

“The arts in Zimbabwe are struggling for air in an even more repressive atmosphere than anything experienced in South Africa. ‘It’s well past censorship. It’s rule of fear. It’s total control’.”

President George Bush delivers his funding requests for the arts to Congress. “The president followed through on his support for improving Americans’ knowledge of the country’s history by proposing $25 million for a humanities endowment initiative called “We the People.” The president is concerned about our lack of understanding ourselves, our historical amnesia. By contrast, funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that would help television and radio stations make the transition to digital transmission, supported in the past by President Bush, were eliminated in the new budget request.”

Missouri Gov. Bob Holden’s proposes to eliminate funding for the state arts council, which “distributed as much as $5 million in the flush year 2001 to organizations as varied as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to the family folk festival in St. Joseph, Mo. Holden proposes that the council pay for arts programs by dipping into the Missouri Cultural Trust, a state savings account that matches private donations with public money.”

“I think I’d be the teensiest bit more receptive to the fiscal argument against supporting and celebrating Canadian arts, if those who make it so stridently made any attempt to support and celebrate the arts in ways that did not involve spending lots of money. The Roman Catholic Church seems to have less stringent regulations about canonization than we have about naming streets after our artists. How much does it cost to put up a street sign? How much does it cost to weave into the fabric of our cities and towns the evidence of real artists creating real art?”

There’s a cultural crisis in Scotland. Funding for culture is down, and there seems to be little commitment on the part of the government to make culture a priority. “The Executive responds by arguing that it needs to concentrate on health and education. The urge to fund anything cultural has been sapped by the overspend on the parliament building, heralding in an almost Covenanter-like distrust of frivolity.” Scottish arts are healthy now. But does the Scottish Executive plan to “starve Scotland back into the cultural night that preceded the Act of Union – and what an irony that would be.”

The 1950s were boring. Dull. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. The mythology about the 50s is that it was a decade “so constricting that the ’60s had to come along to blow things up.” And yet – look at the art that was created then. “The ’50s produced an amazing body of art, one that we revisit time and again not for kitsch or nostalgia, but for the sense of excitement it conveys.”

Atlanta has an active arts scene. But the city is practically barren of good performance spaces. Those theatres and concert halls that do exist are acoustically dead. But a new arts center at Emory University holds out some promise the city might get its first real concert space, writes Pierre Ruhe.