Category: issues

“There’s something funny and joyful about a place where people don’t pretend that the real world is anything all that important, where cleverness, artistry and merriment is applauded. It’s not that you can’t join the club if you’re not gay; you can’t join the club if you’re not funny.”

Headlining the 25th-anniversary celebration at the Ahmanson Theatre is Barry Manilow, “one of the earliest supporters of L.A.’s answer to the kind of arts high school chronicled in the film and television series ‘Fame.'” The event is intended “to boost the private fundraising [the public school] counts on even in the best of times.”

Michael Kaiser: “It seems that the leadership–in many cases people like me who have been in the field for twenty years or more–has gotten tired, conservative and frightened. We have become so scared that we won’t balance our budgets that we forget that taking risk is a central requisite for arts making.”

“The reason? They could provide no valid bank statements. Proof of financial stability and a bank account in the applicant’s home country is a bureaucratic requirement for British visa authorities, but it is also, according to Iraqi experts, a very tall order in an occupied country with no banking infrastructure.”

“In addition to helping arts groups build new spaces and renovate and expand old ones, the latest initiative aims to encourage the construction of affordable housing for artists in or around some of these spaces and to spur economic development in their surrounding areas.”

“Plans for a refurbishment of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms are being ‘reassessed’ after the city council failed in a £2.7 million bid for Heritage Lottery funding. The money was a cornerstone to the council’s controversial £12 million plan for a total overhaul of the venue.”

“A proposal to place a Dale Chihuly glass museum at financially-struggling Seattle Center has reopened an old debate about what, exactly, the center should be – a park with open spaces or a hub for the arts.”

“A company shows anxiety on its face – that is, on its Web site, which has become the face of the modern corporation. Visit sites for recently troubled or confused enterprises, including Maclaren, Toyota, Playtex, Tylenol and, yes, John Edwards, and you’ll find a range of digital ways of dealing with distress.”

“[Ruth] Mackenzie and her team will create something called Festival 2012, which will run from 21 June to 9 September that year. This is being billed as the ‘finale’ of the Cultural Olympiad, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, has been in motion since September 2008.”

“There is nothing like a contentious political debate to get the arts out of their ghetto and into the news section. … Yet for every successful piece of political art, there is a lot of wreckage.” And it’s not just that politically motivated artworks tend to preach to the already-converted …