Category: issues

Yes, there are still artists who choose to live in spaces without heat. Folks like the six recent college grads with a makeshift stage in their Baltimore factory space. The young novelist in Pittsburgh who runs a (cold) writers’ colony in two old clapboard houses. The well-established 56-year-old sculptor who’s spent 30 years in an unheated Lower East Side loft. The science writer with a one-room house in Western New York with a wood stove and no running water.

“Straitened financial circumstances and audience drift are issues that have been festering for years, and the recent recession didn’t help. The analysts behind the index hope their data — taken between 1998 and 2008 — will clarify the predicament the arts find themselves in and provide a roadmap for new artistic and business models.”

“Government patronage is no panacea in Europe, admirable and beautiful though it may be in principle and sometimes in reality. Private patronage, meanwhile, can have its distinct advantages. True, strings are usually attached. But a variety of donors tend to allow an institution more independence and flexibility, more lightness on its feet.”

“Cultural support in New York State would be cut $9.6 million under the 2010-11 budget proposed by Gov. David A. Paterson on Tuesday. … The governor’s proposal would cut funds to the New York State Council on the Arts by $6.5 million for its grant-making and by $600,000 for its administrative budget.”

“Telecom companies, the primary opponents of net neutrality, … [have] smartly turned the language of net neutrality on its ear. While neutrality advocates want network owners not to interfere with data, telecom companies say they want the government to keep its hands off the Internet.”

“The academic department has become a guild, and, like any self-regulating bureaucracy, its errand is to replicate itself. … [The] result is that the university literature department is not especially well suited to the business of producing either interesting literary criticism or interesting literary critics. What it does well, of course, is produce good literature professors.”

The proposed 10-year plan is “intended to be ‘politician-proof, so that it doesn’t really matter what the political climate is, we’re clear what we want to do in the arts’.” Among the “more radical suggestions” in the plan “is a thorough shake-up of ACE’s current funding system.”

Known for its arts and architecture, Jacmel had been a tourist destination. Hundreds of people were killed there in the earthquake, but the devastation to the city is manageable, and rebuilding and restoration seem possible.

“Orlando officials and arts boosters plan to break ground this spring on the first phase of the Dr. P. Phillips Orlando Performing Arts Center – but they don’t yet have the money to pay for it or a firm plan on how to get it.”

“Modern communications might have made the world smaller in many ways, but many arts remain as local as they ever have been. You have to be there to experience them. … Australians rely on festivals to keep in touch with the wider world. … [They] play a crucial role in seeding our collective and individual imaginations, in stirring the cultural pond so it doesn’t sink into stagnation.”