Category: issues

“Birmingham City Council is to slash its arts budget by almost £2 million a year over the next three years, with some companies having their funding cut by 50%.” The total reduction in city arts spending is around 16% rather than the 30% many had feared.

The Madison City Council, “despite concern over the impact on employees, voted 14-5 for a deal between the city and Overture officials on ownership and operations that will allow Overture and donors to erase a $28.6 million bank debt that has threatened to close Overture and imperiled its reputation.”

The word “criticism” has a double meaning. There is the ordinary-usage sense of it to mean “fault-finding,” which implies an offended response almost by definition. Less obviously tending to provoke anger and defensiveness is criticism as, in Collini’s words, “the general public activity of bringing some matter under reasoned or dispassionate scrutiny.”

“Nicolas Buissart leads an ‘Urban Safari’ that includes climbing a slag heap, exploring never-used metro stations, walking down streets reputed to be the ugliest in this country, and visiting the house where the painter Magritte’s mother lived – before she drowned herself in the canal. If this sounds like fun, hop into his van, which has no seats.”

No: “[One] of the great things about America is difference, and we Jews are part of that difference. I would even say that we, like other tiny minority groups, have a calling to be different.” Yes: “You’re not really giving our valuable cultural differences that much credit if you believe a couple of twinkling lights can erase a Jewish past.”

“Santa doesn’t check church attendance to decide whether he’s going to give a child a present – he checks whether she’s been naughty or nice. He’s the perfect secular judge of moral fiber. To say that the secularists injure the Christmas spirit is much like the claim that two men getting hitched will besmirch the sanctity of marriage.”

“Arts organisations have been locked in emergency talks with Birmingham City Council after a leaked document revealed proposals to cut £3.5 million in arts funding in the next four years. The drastic funding cuts have proposed 16 arts organisations out of 22 … should have all support withdrawn by 2013/14.”

“The conviction that the arts yield a good return for a relatively small investment, and that they are a vital component in Ireland’s international image, possibly saved the sector from more severe cuts in this week’s austerity budget.”

“It’s a phenomenon of an era of austerity – pop-up projects are usually self-financing and rarely enjoy the cushion of public subsidy – but it’s also a terrific medium through which young and/or indigent people can show initiative and imagination, garner valuable experience and display their wares without being trampled on by officialdom.”

“What’s striking to an outsider about all this is the extent to which the state of Italy’s opera houses, and of the arts more broadly, remains central to public discourse, to national identity and Italian pride, even if most Italians today do not actually attend operas or visit museums.”