Category: issues

“Virtually all of society’s problems are problems that both originate in the cities and are being solved there.”

As executive director of the Arts for L.A., Danielle Brazell’s job “included regularly prodding City Hall to spend more money and pay more attention to L.A.’s nonprofit arts scene.” Now she’ll be the one getting the prods.

The legacy of the “culture of poverty” has made a generation of Americans shy away from difficult questions around culture and achievement. The best way to repent is not to continue ignoring these questions, but to insist upon a more rigorous and detailed examination of them—more than the Tiger Mom herself can provide.

The former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre “urges them to stop adopting the political jargon that distorts what art is, to refuse to reduce ticket prices to seduce a new public, and to stop moaning.”

“Yes, beauty is only skin deep. Yes, we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Yes, critics shouldn’t disparage people for their God-given physical features. But we live in a visual age. Magazines — not to mention theater, opera, and dance companies — would be out of business if they pretended otherwise. Or do you think it’s a coincidence that there are no unpleasant-looking people on Good Morning America?”

The budget just approved by the state legislature allocates $5 million to the CAC. “The council, which issues grants to nonprofit arts groups and arts education programs, had seen its annual allocation from state tax coffers stagnate at $1 million since 2003-04, down from a peak of nearly $31 million in 2000-2001.”

It’s true that advertisers have a lot more data – vast seas of data – from the Web than they ever did from print or broadcast. But researchers are finding that much of that data, and most ads, aren’t really useful for convincing people to buy things they weren’t going to buy anyway.

“The obvious answer is that it teaches us what you’re interested in. The less-obvious, but equally true, answer is that it teaches you what you’re interested in. If we merely asked what you wanted, without measuring what you wanted, you’d just keep lying to us – and to yourself. … Ask audiences what they want, and they’ll tell you vegetables. Watch them quietly, and they’ll mostly eat candy.”

Every year Nikki Haley uses her line-item veto power to try to zero out the South Carolina Arts Commission’s budget, and every year the state Legislature overrides her veto and restores the funding. This year, for once, she didn’t bother, and the Commission’s $2.9 million budget is intact.

That’s one of the suggestions – for the city, suburban towns, and the county – made by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Cultural Life Task Force, convened by local government to suggest solutions to what the task force found was a year-after-year shortfall of $8 million in the local arts sector.