“It is a sector that is under fire. Arts funding is under unimaginable strain… I want to be clear, and if I appear a little nervous, it is because I want to say that our vast creative potential is being strangled without any clear funding strategy for its long-term future.”
Category: issues
Dayton’s Orchestra, Opera Company And Ballet Merge
“It’s a new day for the arts in Dayton. The Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, Dayton Ballet and Dayton Opera are officially united. The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, a new nonprofit performing arts organization, started operation July 1.”
South Carolina Governor Zeros Out Arts Commission Budget
“Nikki Haley struck the combined $9.5 million budgets of the South Carolina Arts Commission and the South Carolina Sea Grants Consortium late Thursday night, two of her 81 vetoes of the state’s $23 billion state budget.”
Claim: Scottish Arts Policy Changes Bode Ill For UK Arts Funding
“It’s New Labour meets the politburo. There’s a centralising of curatorial decision-making, and an application of political ideology on which organisations and which projects should get funded. Creative Scotland is dissolving the arm’s-length principle and acting like a central committee.”
What Cities Can Learn From Trying To Fix Bogota
“Ultimately Bogotá is a reminder that the economic and social lives of neighborhoods and whole cities rise and fall depending on access to public transit, public parks, public spaces.”
Experiments In Arts Journalism
“If the public’s only encounter with arts criticism comes via tweets or YouTube videos, is it any wonder that it can’t articulate or appreciate the value of the arts and humanities? Thus the understandable though self-defeating recourse to coverage that sees that the arts are valuable mainly because of their economic benefits or their potential for gossip.”
What The Hell Is Really Going On With The New York Public Library?
“The debate is getting bitter. Hundreds of writers, from Peter Carey to Mario Vargas Llosa, have gone on record against the plan. An exhaustive exposé in the literary magazine n+1 raised the temperature, and the current issue of theNew York Review of Books contains page after page of tetchy point v counterpoint. Whatever the fate of our library, a lot of people are going to be very angry when this is all over.”
Our Age Of Intimacy – And The Backlash
“The passions provoked by the show [Girls]–among both critics and admirers–suggest something both refreshing and a little startling: that a pop-culture product that focusses mostly on women and intimate, sometimes gruesome details of their lives, is still considered a provocation.”
Putting A Monetary Value On The Arts – Is That Possible, Or Even Desirable?
“We tend to think of the arts as ‘independent and esoteric.’ In fact, they are dependent (meaning simply, ‘connected’) and everyday.Trying to tease out their monetary value, therefore, is practically impossible, not to mention their effects on our other cultural practices. Just look at the local effects of one little satirical sketch comedy show, Portlandia, on the city and its sense of itself. How do you measure that?”
As The Olympics Near, London’s East End Transforms (Somewhat)
London’s East End “is persistently seen as other – as mysterious and threatening, as an orphan child prompting pity, as something unknowable which must therefore be tamed by stereotypes. It has lent itself to exploitation on a large scale, from the high-walled and ferociously defended docks, to Fortress Wapping, as the base of Rupert Murdoch’s News International was once called. Grand gestures are repeatedly imposed from outside, whose aims are at once charitable and controlling.” Will the 2012 Olympics be any different?