Category: issues

“Next year’s budget allocation for the Irish Arts Council will fall by 3.2% to €63.1 million (£53.8 million) as the country seeks to curb public spending in response to continuing economic difficulties. The announcement … follows a 20% reduction in arts council funds over the past four years.”

“Since the dawn of the postmodern age, ironical writers have struggled to imbue the printed word with the nuances of sarcasm.” So an enterprising typesetter has invented a special sarcasm font.

In the wake of two poets withdrawing from the T.S. Eliot prize thanks to what they considered a skeezy corporate sponsor, Observer books editor William Skidelsky and novelist Geoff Dyer debate the value of ideals to the starving (or perhaps not particularly prosperous) artist.

The talk of woe in the arts – as in, where’s all the discretionary spending going, anyway – has numbers to back it up: spending on all entertainment has dropped 7 percent since 2009.

“We are getting languages where the first writing is not the translation of the Bible — as it has often happened — but text messages.”

“The news that a leading scholar felt constrained by legal advice from giving a full opinion on a group of drawings attributed to Francis Bacon highlights a growing fear among experts that they might be sued for giving their opinion.”

“Plans for a $75 million expansion of the Ordway Center — the biggest arts building project since the new Guthrie Theater was completed in 2006 — were announced Thursday by four arts groups. The 56,000-square-foot expansion will create a primary home for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.”

“The Arts Board’s more exacting approach comes in a charged political atmosphere that is focusing greater scrutiny on state funds intended for the arts. Some leaders from organizations whose applications came up short complain the Arts Board lacks the staff to answer questions and help applicants through what they say is a byzantine grant process.”

One of the US Works Progress Administration’s projects in the 1930s was a collection of interviews of the last surviving freed slaves from the American South. Some 27 of those interviews were caught on tape (including one conducted by Zora Neale Hurston), and the Library of Congress has now made those recordings available.

“The fate of a performing arts center slated to be designed by Frank Gehry for the World Trade Center site is in limbo as its boosters await the creation of a board of directors necessary for $100 million in funding.”