Category: issues

Things aren’t exactly great at the moment. Whew: “Now on its fourth leader in five years, Lincoln Center — the country’s largest performing arts complex — finds itself suffering from shuffled priorities, financial difficulties and instability at its highest rank during a time when cultural organizations are struggling to retain and build donors and audiences.”

“The draft strategy is an opportunity to raise ambitions around the potential and profile of culture and to recognise that culture can be at the centre of wider societal shifts,” the strategy reads. “It places culture as of equal importance alongside other areas such as the economy, education, environment, health and tackling inequality, and values culture for the unique perspectives it can bring.”

“The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation wound down its Artist Awards in 2017, only to bring it back in a modified form as a core component of its mission moving forward. It just announced the seven winners of its 2018 class, and in doing so, addressed two of the big trends in arts philanthropy right now.” Mike Scutari explores how and why.

“Big Philanthropy is definitionally a plutocratic voice in our democracy, an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidized.”

“The German parliament has approved a 9% increase in federal spending on culture, bringing the total budget to €1.8bn. Additional funding has been earmarked for preserving and protecting heritage buildings, archive materials and memorial sites. Another priority of the budget is to increase arts offerings and education in rural regions, says the German culture minister Monika Grütters.”

Hip hop culture illuminates a way forward within Canadian cultural institutions’ growth, evolution and vibrancy. It may seem that the spontaneity and improvisation of hip hop — cornerstones of the culture’s innovative core threaded seamlessly throughout dance, djing, rhyming and painting — are structurally and policy-wise an impossibility within cultural institutions. But…

“Whether Sir Anish should leverage a law meant to foster and incentivize creativity and debate to instead silence and censor speech is the question before us. Put another way, does US Copyright law grant a copyright owner the sole and exclusive right to control how their copyrighted work is used?”

Early consequences of the travel ban have already begun to unfold. As we reported in April, even artists who were born in the countries targeted by the ban, but who are American or European citizens, have faced hurdles travelling to the US for work. Last month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Iranian art, but many of the artists included in the show could not attend the opening.

“The Philadelphia History Museum, [known until 2010 as the Atwater Kent and] mandated by the City Charter as Philadelphia’s official attic for things made and owned here — whether President George Washington’s desk or Mike Schmidt’s batting helmet — will close to the public Monday for an undetermined period of time, museum officials said Tuesday evening. The closing comes as Temple University has withdrawn from talks about a possible partnership with the museum, surprising city officials who had expressed optimism about such an alliance as recently as April.”