Category: issues

“Culture secretary Andy Burnham and work and pensions secretary James Purnell have unveiled a scheme to create up to 10,000 entry-level jobs for young people looking to start work in the cultural industries. The positions … will primarily take the form of apprenticeships or on the job training for people aged between 18 to 24 who have been out of work for up to a year.”

“After tangling in court over nearly $40 million in cost overruns on the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has reached an undisclosed settlement with the project’s architects [Pelli Clarke Pelli] and builders [Fluor Corp.].”

“With the donation, [the Orange County, California university] will be able to move forward with plans to build a performing arts center to showcase its growing College of Performing Arts, which has more than 700 students. Currently, students studying music, theater and dance perform in an 88-year-old auditorium that was originally built for Orange High School.”

“Carnegie Hall, the 118-year-old concert hall in New York City, plans to sell $100 million of bonds later this year to fund renovations of its studio towers and backstage areas, according to Standard & Poor’s.”

“Surprisingly, after five decades, the origin of the word ‘Lincoln’ in Lincoln Center ‘is a mystery,’ said Judith Johnson, Lincoln Center’s corporate archivist. ‘It is one of those questions that should have an answer — because so many other places in New York have a reason for their naming. But that’s not true here.'”

“[M]oney primes people to be ‘self-insulating,’ … or prone to burrow deep within themselves, whether for self-protection or self-aggrandizement. And where else in the country are people such a powerful amalgam of self-involvement and motivation? […] The city that once revolved around the dollar has been temporarily tapped off its axis … How does a city in withdrawal behave?”

Toronto’s “Koffler Centre of the Arts has ‘disassociated’ itself from a Jewish artist whose project they helped fund, after discovering her ties to Israeli Apartheid Week, a campus coalition which accuses Israel of being an apartheid state and has been severely criticized for being anti-Israel.”

Though there’s much to be done and some major design decisions still to be dealt with, “all around the campus are signs that the overhaul of Lincoln Center, the country’s largest performing arts center, is in the home stretch.”

“If a sprawling performing-arts complex like Lincoln Center were proposed today, it would never be built. Some of the impediments would be practical: the daunting costs, the lack of political consensus, the shift in attitudes toward large-scale urban development projects that displace entire neighborhoods. But the larger question is whether such a complex should be built in the first place.”

“Martin Bright, the journalist and founder of the New Deal of the Mind campaign, argues that we risk losing a generation of talent and intellectual capital if we in the arts don’t react immediately and imaginatively to the challenge of the financial crisis.”