Category: issues

“The $354m Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre and the neighbouring Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House by Foster + Partners are the latest instalments in the stuttering history of Dallas’s Arts District, a long-running project that is rather ambitiously trying to surpass New York’s Lincoln Center as the nation’s premier arts centre.”

“After delivering the biggest box office result in the festival’s history, Brett Sheehy’s programming appears to have been vindicated by audiences, and, it must be said, by performers whose enthusiasm and skill justified their inclusion in the festival.”

London mayor Boris Johnson has said a decision to reject his nominee as the capital’s chair on the Arts Council was “purely political”.

“The country’s brutal 12-year civil war of 1980-92 not only claimed tens of thousands of lives and razed entire villages. It also ravaged the country’s heritage, fostering widespread amnesia about Salvadoran literature, music, indigenous culture and the performing arts.” Next week, a festival in Los Angeles “will try to salvage some of that missing past.”

“Rocco Landesman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced Wednesday that he is taking a whistle-stop tour of the country to ‘spotlight all the ways that art works.'” Such a tour “has been a technique that previous NEA chairmen, going back to the tenure of actress Jane Alexander, have undertaken.”

The generously compensated stagehands at Carnegie Hall aren’t alone. “[A]t our own Music Center, those well-paid New Yorkers’ top five peers … averaged $221,000” in 2007-08, while the top earner among stagehands for Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl made $295,000 in 2006-07.

NEA chairman Rocco Landesman “acknowledged that he has had to spend time dealing with attacks by conservatives who have accused the NEA of promoting Obama’s legislative agenda and of funding pornography in California,” but he said he believes “the culture war stuff is receding in history.”

As Shepard Fairey continues his battle with the AP over his {theft/repurposing} of a photo of Barack Obama, Tim Wu gives a brief refresher course on what does or doesn’t constitute “fair use” of copyrighted material under current US law.

The renovated Koch Theater (né New York State Theater) at Lincoln Center “announces to the world that New York City Ballet and New York City Opera – despite a history of tensions and disagreements that initially threatened the project, and despite City Opera’s strained finances – have managed to move forward as roommates.”

If Pope Benedict can reinstate the Latin Mass, then why not? “In September and October, the relics of a 19th-century nun, St. Therese of Lisieux, went on a 28-stop tour around Great Britain. If the thousands of devotees who came to witness these lovely bones are any indication, the faithful are hungering for a less sterile form of religion.”