Category: issues

“One occupies $232 million worth of serious architecture on a promontory overlooking downtown Los Angeles. The other rents cramped space in a South L.A. church. … [I]t may be too early to say which of the two has the most potential to nurture the next generation of artists and performers.”

“[T]o survey the ENO output across the upcoming season is to encounter a commitment to theater names unusual in the world of opera, which tends to have its own coterie of directors. The lineup of talent for the year ahead includes four companies better known for their work in physical theater.”

“[I]t is worth asking this: why do so many significant British artists now live and work overseas?” Are other countries more hospitable, creatively and practically, to good work?

“The idea is to convert the creativity of quasi-mass audiences into an alternative to a formal research-and-development lab for a wide variety of objects.”

The infamous Peekskill Riots, perpetrated by mobs at Paul Robeson concerts in 1949, were “long ago, so long that community and religious groups in town caused nary a stir when they put together plans for a concert to be held Friday, 60 years later. … [W]hat those long-ago events mean today, what resonance the fears and angers of 1949 have for the fears and angers of 2009, well that’s a subject as rich and complicated as the man who set the events in motion.”

“Artists are at least as flawed as anyone else; we’ve had murderers, pedophiles, philanderers, anti-Semites, homophobes, xenophobes, Satanists, and more writing books and poems, composing music, directing films, painting and sculpting… If we remove all the art by artists of bad character from our lives, who are we hurting?”

“Money, the root of much current brooding, can also be a spark plug for artistic thought, and our relationship with it turns out to be a persistent thread running through this year’s Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe.” That’s true of the the art and also of “the festival, whose budget is tighter this year, given the general economic picture.”

This week, British Columbia “community and arts groups that had been promised three-year funding in writing … were told their grants were cancelled.” In the face of a furious public backlash, the provincial government did a one-day about-face; a minister said that “$40 million [Can] in grants would be restored this year, and there could be additional money to be handed out.”

Some users worry about the new policy that alterations to certain high-profile entries must be cleared by an editor. No need to fret. “Rather than a signal Wikipedia’s coming of age or a shift away from democracy, these new rules merely formalize, for certain pages, what’s already happening on the site.”

“Surprisingly, as many music and book retailers have shuttered in recent years, a number of stores … haven’t seen their sales fall at all. How have they managed to do that? The book and record stores that have survived are playing up their roles as community centers that serve as unique cultural spaces rather than just a place to buy a quick CD or magazine.”