Category: issues

“The first 22 recipients of the $5 million PNC Arts Alive grant initiative will be announced today, providing funding for the expansion of audiences, programming and technology in the region’s cultural arena, according to PNC Foundation officials. Announced in March, Arts Alive is a five-year pilot for PNC Financial Services’ charitable arm. If it is deemed a success in and around Philadelphia, the bank intends to start it up elsewhere.”

Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser, “the turnaround king,” embarks on a tour to all 50 states. He aims to talk financially strapped arts organizations out of trying to save their way to health — and tell them why they shouldn’t believe old chestnuts are a safer bet than adventurous programming.

“The 212 liberal arts colleges that Breneman identified in 1990 have now decreased to 137. Many former liberal arts colleges are evolving, consciously or unconsciously, into more academically complex institutions offering numerous vocational as well as arts and science majors. In the process, they may have lost the focused mission and carefully integrated academic program that for generations made small liberal arts colleges a model of quality undergraduate education.”

“Glasgow has always had a reputation as a city of buskers. A healthy folk music scene has provided the streets with a steady supply of acoustic musicians, and the city has never been short of drunk men with tin whistles, chancing their luck in shop doorways. But the arrival of new immigrants in recent years – often accomplished musicians who bring their own countries’ traditional music to the Scottish streets – has reinforced Glasgow’s reputation as a city of buskers with above-average talent.”

“What we are seeing is the simultaneous collapse of politics that isn’t politics, and art that isn’t art. Both of them had managed, with quite startling effectiveness, to replace the actual substance of their occupation with superbly professional public relations, dazzling, but meaningless rhetoric and brazen self-justification which was sustainable so long as it did not over-reach itself. But with over-confidence came the fall. The palpable failures have been followed by public outrage.”

“In February the NEA received $50 million from the administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to preserve jobs in the arts. Since then the NEA gave 40 percent of the funding to state and regional arts agencies. This week the agency announced the recipients of the competitive round for nonprofit groups.”

“The University of Southern California is collecting intriguing new approaches to cultural coverage, the best of which will be explored at an on-campus summit this fall.”

“Aficionados of dance music are used to waiting until the wee hours to catch top-of-the-line talent. But especially in summer an array of early parties, some outdoors, offer a respite from late nights and expensive clubs, allowing people with day jobs the opportunity to hear the latest in experimental beats and still be at the office on time in the morning.”

“With attendance falling short of targets, the government has been seeking ways to boost the number of visitors in the long term, given the threat from a rival Disney theme park planned for Shanghai.”

“In the weeks leading up to this week’s publication of Free, the author of the bestselling The Long Tail has seen his latest book assailed by traditional journalists, including the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, characterized by reviewers as simple, even dangerous, and at the same time slammed for by others for not being free enough. A controversy over passages lifted from Wikipedia didn’t help. For Anderson, however, it all just confirms that he’s on to something.”