Category: issues

“The charity deduction is something of a sacred cow. To some, it’s a subsidy for giving. To others, it’s a much-needed incentive for people to give to nonprofits that provide services that the government either can’t or won’t.”

“For arts groups that have struggled with rising deficits, staff layoffs and artistic cuts during the recession, news that significant GM dollars have started to flow to culture has been greeted with elation.”

“The $268-million Mashouf Performing Arts Center will include five separate performance spaces ranging in size from 60 to 1,200 seats. While the faceted, block-like geometry and bright white palette of the project will be familiar to anybody who has followed Michael Maltzan’s work, the scale won’t be.”

The 14-week Black Creek Summer Music Festival – a 20-concert music festival that will be held at a tennis arena at York University in northern Toronto. Theatre impresario Garth Drabinsky is the festival’s artistic director. Conductor Lorin Maazel and Broadway composer-conductor Marvin Hamlisch are listed as artistic advisors, and both will also perform.”

“While the city no doubt faces critical fiscal challenges, the arts are no less essential to the growth of a great city. As mayor, I will maintain adequate funding for the CSO and other arts groups important to the city of Chicago, and ensure that we use our incredible public assets — like Millennium and Grant Parks — to showcase these performances.”

“People were managing so many different priorities that the project stagnated. Political calendars guided the project rather than construction calendars.”

Revenues plummeted by 85% over the past four seasons, with the number of bookings (mostly rock acts) falling from 23 to three. The performers’ backstage area isn’t even air-conditioned. Part of the problem seems to be that the Amphitheatre is run by Mesa’s parks department rather than its arts and cultural department, which runs the city’s four-theater fine arts center.

“Universities are not only increasingly indebted to corporations, they are corporations themselves, run with corporate management techniques, carefully constructed brands, and aggressive sales (i.e., recruitment) staff. The annual budgets of some larger universities are greater than those of some nation states.”

“It’s hard to describe the feeling of stuttering to anyone who has always spoken smoothly. It is not a nervous impulse. It is not, despite appearances, a spastic feeling. Stuttering starts in the voice box and the upper lungs with something like a pressure clench, the sensation of some valves closing against a flow, a trap tripping its release at the wrong moment.”