Category: issues

In American elections, arts policy hardly even rates a mention. But Australia’s Victorian government is up for election, and the major parties are scrapping to differentiate their arts policies from one another. If campaign promises are to be believed, the arts are in for soime funding increases.

Boston has a redevelopment program that includes significant new space for artists. It’s just that artists complain that much of the new space is so luxe they’ll never be able to afford it.

This week the Dallas Symphony Orchestra had to find a substitute when Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden’s visa wasn’t issued in time for his scheduled performances. “Visa process that once took 45 to 60 days has more than doubled, with 4 1/2 months being the average time at present. Since applications for work visas are not accepted more than six months before the date of entry, there’s little room to deal with the problem of visas that take longer than average.”

Earlier this year the Nova Scotia government disbanded its arts council, looking for “administrative savings.” Now a group of arts supporters has formed its own arts support group. “The new group, Arms Length Funding for the Arts (ALFA), calls itself a ‘broad group of concerned Nova Scotians’ trying to restore funding for the arts.”

The need to widen public access to the arts has become a modern political mantra. If government is to fund the arts, the argument goes, then the arts must be made available to as many people as possible. They must be made accessible to new audiences, especially to young audiences, by opening doors, by cutting or abolishing entrance costs – and by reaching out to the public through activities such as the opera workshops in East End schools. The virtue of such efforts as these is now so universally accepted that it is striking to discover that many in the arts have got their doubts about aspects of it, and that those doubts are increasing.”

Three years ago the British government decided to wean the Commonwealth Institute off its subsidies and privatize it. A plan was worked out for a dowry of £8 million, half of which was for repairing the roof of its prestigious London building. But even before the privatization is about to take place, the institute’s “library is closed to the public, most of the staff on short-term contracts have been sacked and the unique collection of works is being put into vans, with the institute’s art, for removal to the underfunded Museum of Empire and Commonwealth, in Bristol. The trustees and governors are accused of planning to sell off the organisation’s prestigious headquarters for millions of pounds and dump its unique 50-year-old library.”

A few more details about Ruth Lilly’s $100 million gift to Poetry Magazine this week. “According to local court records, Lilly also donated at least $80 million to Americans for the Arts, an advocacy and educational group based in Washington. Its president and CEO, Robert Lynch, said that his group’s annual budget is currently $8 million and that its endowment is less than $1 million.” And this: “In 1981, a court declared Lilly mentally incompetent, and the control of her estate was turned over to her brother, Josiah K. Lilly III. Since his death, her lawyer, Thomas Ewbank has served as her attorney. National City Bank in Indianapolis has managed her estate, now worth about $1.2 billion. Nonetheless, she can make her wishes, Ewbank said.”

The arts building boom continues, even though arts groups around America are struggling for money. “Despite terrorist attacks, rising costs, decreases in consumers’ discretionary spending, and myriad philanthropic challenges, the theatrical building and renovation boom is arguably as hot as it was in the 1990s – and not just in New York City.”

The New York City Council is close to passing a law which would ban the use of cell phones at public performances, concerts, etc. The definition of “use” in this case would include “allow to ring” as a violation. Violators would be subject to a $50 fine, but there is some question as to how such a measure would be enforced without creating an even greater disruption than a phone.

Scholar and cultural critic George Steiner is worried about us. Specifically, he worries that while nearly all of us know how to read a computer manual, very few of us have read The Iliad or Ulysses. Is the modernity of Western life destroying our cultural history? “Every generation loses a little bit of the past, as new poems and novels jostle for attention. But Steiner (like Baudrillard, Sontag and Paglia) believes that the catastrophic forgetfulness that has overtaken the West since the Second World War is a sign that the print culture that sustained us for six centuries is actually dying.”