Category: issues

“Spain’s magicians are up in arms over a television show hosted by a rebel prestidigitator who reveals many of the secrets behind their tricks. The magicians have asked Spanish lawyers to come up with ways of challenging the Masked Magician and his programme Magic Without Secrets in court, claiming that their favourite tricks should be protected by intellectual property laws.”

“[N]ew figures show the vast variety of thousands of performers making their way to Edinburgh every August – with acts this year from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Albania and Malta as well as the largest contingents from America and Australia. Since 2002, shows from England on the Fringe have gone from 650 to 1,206 – more than half the 2,159 total this year.” Meanwhile, “despite the weaker pound, foreign shows have dropped sharply amid the credit crunch.”

The news that “UCLA is considering closing down its arts library and merging the collection with an existing facility because of an overall budget shortfall … has provoked strong responses from local academics and now faculty members at UCLA have started an online campaign to save the library.”

The proposal – which includes a complex with three performances spaces (2700, 950 and 200 seats) and a parking garage, plus more than 500 condos as well as townhouses and retail stores – calls for locally-backed bonds but no taxpayer funding. Yet every single councilperson said that the financial risk to the city is too great.

“The London games will start on the same weekend Edinburgh’s festivals season starts and will continue until the end of the second weekend of the Fringe, by which time the EIF will also be up and running. Fringe venue operators say ticket-sale fears are based on recent experience when the festival coincided with the Athens and Beijing Olympics. However, a special taskforce has been set up to work out how Edinburgh can capitalise on the 2012 Olympics….”

“The opening of Belfast’s £17.5 million flagship arts centre may be delayed by up to a year after it emerged that work on the new city-centre venue has not yet begun five months after it was originally scheduled to. Construction of the Metropolitan Arts Centre, the city’s first purpose-built multi-platform arts venue, has been held up because the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure [in London] has failed to release funding of £10.8 million necessary to allow it to proceed.”

“Fire-breathing bizarros are so hard to find these days. (No, Glenn Beck doesn’t count.) And when’s the last time you saw a girl change into a gorilla? A headless woman? The Human Blockhead? (Again, Glenn Beck doesn’t count.) What used to be a mainstay of American circuses and county fairs – the sideshow grotesquerie – is on its last legs.”

“It’s widely accepted, of course, that Glasgow’s arts scene is one of the freshest and most exciting in the UK. Almost all Scotland’s major arts organisations are based here, from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet. … But can the city really compete during festival month, when Edinburgh hosts the largest and most diverse series of arts festivals in the world?”

“China said on Monday it will challenge a World Trade Organisation ruling against its restrictions on imported films, books and audio-visual products, continuing its sparring with Washington over trade access.”

“[T]he setbacks endured by our museums and performing arts companies have generally been less severe than those suffered by their counterparts in the United States, where an atonal symphony of shrinking endowment funds, belt-tightening philanthropy and declining attendance have created a climate of retrenchment. Closer to home, the good news is that the major players have all survived. The bad news is that many of them have been wounded and weakened in ways that could make it hard for them to operate at peak level for years to come.”