Category: issues

“Last week’s budget projected $2.25-million in arts funding for 2010-11, down from $19.5-million in 2008-09. And days before the budget came down, late on a Friday afternoon now dubbed Black Friday by arts organizations, groups were informed by e-mail that the funding they were expecting through community gaming grants – money the province makes from gambling revenues – would be denied.”

David Mamet: “[In race, as in sex,] desire, self-interest and self-image make the truth inconvenient to share not only with strangers (who may, legitimately or not, be viewed as opponents) but also with members of one’s own group, and, indeed, with oneself.”

And, as Slate “Human Guinea Pig” Emily Yoffe found, it requires some effort, but less than one might imagine. The secret: italic script, as opposed to the loopy, never-pick-your-pen-up cursive most of us learned in primary school.

“I keep returning to the question, leaving statistics and their damn lies (as the saying goes) aside, why is Minneapolis more respected as a cultural city than Denver?”

“The central problem facing the arts today is not a lack of flute players, choreographers, actors or painters. The main challenge the arts world must address is the lack of a large, trained corps of managers who know how to find resources, attract audiences and other constituents and provide support to our artists.”

Lyn Gardner: “The assessors – a mixture of artists, critics, journalists and academics – are being described by the Arts Council as a form of peer review. This is not what I and many others had in mind during the debates about peer review that took place last year.”

Michael Billington: “Only a fool would deny that criticism has been affected by the rise of new technology. But I’ve spent my life arguing that a review is simply a way of starting a debate. … What has changed is the technology: any opinion is now open to instant, rapid rebuttal online.”

There are 29 candidates longlisted for the UK’s “city of culture,” an unfunded designation “intended to build on the European capital of culture award. One is peculiarly hard to pin down geographically, and another has requested its name be withheld, which could cause a few problems for tourists should it win the title in 2013.”

“For decades Irish-based writers, musicians and visual artists have been exempt from paying income tax on their earnings under the Republic’s tax laws.” A code revision may end that. “Intended to help struggling artists, [the exemption] has been criticised in the past because high-earning performers such as U2 were paying no tax….”