Category: issues

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had intended to shift $415,000 to four organizations he’d chosen. “Restoring the money to the $2.76-million arts grants program would be good news for 35 organizations that would have lost their grants even though they had been approved through the standard application process in which panels of experts review and score each proposal.”

Until a couple of centuries ago, if “you managed to overrun a people, you got to take their stuff. It was straightforward. What else was war for? … In modern warfare, however, plunder is very taboo.” But undoing the plunder of earlier generations is complicated: “Who owns these things to begin with? The state? Can the current Italian government lay claim to a Roman statue that left the country decades ago under the watch of a much less conscientious leader?”

With the city of Los Angeles in severe financial trouble, Mayor Villaraigosa’s proposed austerity budget calls for the staff at El Pueblo de Los Angeles to be reduced by nearly half, with lost positions including one of two historian-curators.

“The New Jersey Performing Arts Center publicly unveiled plans for an ambitious high-rise building in Newark today. For the fourth time.” The project, now renamed One Theatre Square, “is a collaboration between NJPAC and Dranoff Properties. … but as in past years, today’s event did not explain how the planners will pay for it.”

“This season, two micro-communities of visual-arts and performing-arts leaders are finding that collaboration is the secret to creating a vibrant scene in the wake of a debilitating recession. Their efforts are leading to more programming–much of it free–for arts-minded New Yorkers.”

“Birmingham’s cultural venues generate more than £270 million for the city every year, according to new research.” According to the report, “for every £1 of funding by Birmingham City Council, city centre venues and companies provide a return on investment of £29.”

“In 1903, 29-year-old Japanese pioneer and recent NYU graduate Jo Sakai had a notion. He would gather together a small band of enthusiasts, investors, and hangers-on, he told the Jacksonville Board of Trade. Together, they would grow pineapples and rearrange a little piece of America based on utopian ideals and Japanese know-how.”

“It is not a minor detour on the tourist path nor a mere question of convenience, like deciding to enter through the garage door rather than trek around to the vestigial front porch. The closing of the front doors of the Supreme Court, like so many mindless decisions attributed to security concerns, is a grand affront — architecturally, symbolically, politically. The decision will enforce new and unwanted meanings on one of the city’s most dramatic and successful public buildings.”

“The Canada Council for the Arts will administer the hotly debated prizes as well as the $25-million endowment the government has pledged to form them. … Even the scant details made public when the Canada Prizes were first announced in late January of 2009 have been wiped away, and virtually all options are on the table….”

“Kennedy Center president Michael M. Kaiser said the gift from Betsy and Dick DeVos will help arts administrators for nonprofit organizations get specialized training” at “the Kennedy Center’s 9-year-old arts management institute, which has trained about 4,000 arts administrators in long-term planning, marketing and other areas.”