Category: issues

“Omnivores — defined by sociologists as people who regularly participate in a broad range of cultural activities — represent a small minority of the population, but a large portion of the arts audience. In a new analysis recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts, author Mark J. Stern concludes that this engaged, energetic group is both shrinking in size and becoming less active.”

“Carrying debt during turbulent economic times continues to cloud the financial picture for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, which on Tuesday saw Standard & Poor’s Financial Services downgrade the investment outlook on its $232.5 million in construction bonds from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’.”

“After 19 years of planning and development – and $51 million from county tourism and other taxes – the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay is gearing up to open its doors in April.”

“The cuts are a kind of idiocy. These people are buffoons and philistines. We cannot rely on an endless supply of good actors and directors with no investment. Funding is already right on the edge and these will not be cuts; they will be amputations.”

“As Japan struggles with a woeful trail of disaster, Carnegie is about to plunge into a 40-event exploration of that country’s culture … As of Sunday no performers had withdrawn, and all but one event” – a business-oriented panel discussion – “was scheduled to go forward.”

Philip Kennicott: “The Kennedy Center is physically isolated from the city of Washington by bad urban planning. It remains artistically isolated by a consistent lack of imagination about what a major urban arts center can do.”

“The region’s power brokers – Ed and Midge Rendell among them – promoted it as an economic engine, a town square pumping foot traffic in and out 18 hours a day, a friendly new face for classical music, and an antidote to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s longtime home, the acoustically dry Academy of Music. But on these fronts, the Kimmel – now in its 10th season and hundreds of millions of dollars later – is still very much a work in progress.”

“Of course, in the North slavery can seem like a distant abstraction, creating its own problems. But in Charleston all abstractions are gone. The strange thing is how long it has taken to see the substance, and how much more is yet to be shown. … [Until] the 1990s, slavery’s role was generally met with silence.”

The spectacular new Guangzhou Opera House “is the most extreme example. ‘You have the GOH with no [resident] symphony and no opera chorus,’ says one observer. ‘Beijing and the local government pitched in to build the opera house but when it comes to programming the attitude is ‘You mean we have to pay for that too?'”

“The model of corporate governance is broken. Arts & Business has been as guilty as any of encouraging corporate leaders to be on the boards. When times are fine, it’s good. When times are bad, a risk-averseness comes into a trustee board and grips like a cold hand on a throat. We are seeing managements terrorised, marginalised and treated with contempt by trustees.