Category: issues

“Just as François Mitterrand built the Louvre pyramid and Georges Pompidou lent his name to the landmark modern art museum, Sarkozy is searching for his own cultural legacy. But his planned museum, with its emphasis on ‘national identity’, has been attacked by academics as a dangerous, nationalistic attempt to pervert history for his own rightwing ideological purposes.”

“The 2010 Otis Report released Wednesday, which uses 2009 data, shows that the “creative economy” here generated $113 billion in revenue and provided 304,400 jobs last year (compared with $121 billion and 342,300 jobs in 2008). That allowed it to hold onto its rank as the second-largest business sector in Los Angeles County.”

“Many Italian monuments could meet the fate of the 2,000-year-old House of Gladiators which collapsed in Pompeii on Saturday, Italian experts warned. ‘With no maintenance and non-existent funds,'” said one advocate, “‘the entire country is at risk. From Bologna’s twin towers to the dome of Florence’s Cathedral and Nero’s Golden House in Rome, many other monuments could be reduced to rubble’.”

“A disgruntled arts blogger has caused a stir in the San Diego arts community for urging freelance writers to boycott the city’s largest newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune [over cuts in its arts coverage]. The kicker is that the call for a boycott was posted on the newspaper’s own website.”

A Merrill Lynch study “found that households with incomes of $200,000 or more, or net worths of at least $1 million (not counting a primary home’s value) devoted 7.5 cents out of their charitable dollar to the arts during 2009, compared to a penny for the population at large.”

President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is considered somewhat less harsh than that of his father, under whom “there were clear red lines of intolerance” toward artistic as well as political expression. “Now those lines are no longer clear, increasing, not diminishing, the sense of uneasiness and tendency toward self-censorship.”

“Prior to modern archaeological research, the ancient history of the Americas was framed within a greatly foreshortened and unrealistic timescale; only recently have we learned to appreciate that the rise of civilisation on this side of the globe broadly parallels advances elsewhere in the world, albeit with its own distinctive character.”

The arts are being challenged by “the corporation, and in particular the corporate ownership of culture, enforced by a copyright regime that has grown steadily since its eighteenth-century inception from fourteen years, to twenty-eight, to fifty and presently to seventy years after death for individuals and ninety-five for corporations.”

“Opera houses, ballet companies, even the National Theater in London, are competing to lure audiences to live high-definition broadcasts in movie theaters, many of which are then shown again. It is the HD-ification of the arts, and it is already affecting programming decisions along with costume and set design, lighting choices and even ticket prices.”

“If, because of cutbacks and lack of support from the federal government, literature and the arts and other aspects of the humanities become just parlor musings of the wealthy, we would have made a huge mistake.”