Category: issues

“Lakewood’s Beck Center for the Arts declared a financial emergency Tuesday, saying it might go out of business if it can’t raise $150,000 by the end of this month.” The Beck houses a theater company, the gallery of the Cleveland Artists Foundation, and a busy, highly-regarded arts school; the center’s annual budget is $2.3 million.

The requested $543,000 is meant “to repair wear and tear on the facility, replace technologically outdated equipment such as lighting boards, and bring the buildings up to standards for fire safety and accessibility. Miami-Dade [County] already subsidizes the center with about $7.5 million each year to pay for utilities, insurance, security and other occupancy costs.”

“A woman held a BlackBerry over the crowd surrounding Linda Ronstadt to get a shot of the onetime queen of country rock. Someone else thrust an album insert and pen at Josh Groban. ‘Just one more photo, please,’ followed jazz musician Wynton Marsalis out of the room. The three musicians were among a group who appeared Tuesday on Capitol Hill to speak in favor of increasing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts to $200 million in the 2010 budget.”

“Large national and international charities such as Greenpeace and Save the Children are often held up as examples of how to set up monthly credit- or debit-card giving programs. But can such programs also work for smaller groups?”

“Two nonprofit arts groups, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and ImageNation, which supports independent cinema and progressive music, were selected on Monday to be part of the proposed Mart 125 redevelopment project, which would transform a centrally located but presently abandoned eyesore on Harlem’s main commercial thoroughfare into a mixed-use space.” But first the project must woo developers.

Under Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposed budget, the “Louisiana Decentralized Arts Fund, a competitive program that makes small grants ranging from $500 to $10,000 to arts and cultural projects in every parish of the state … would be whacked a whopping 83% — effectively putting the program out of business. The arts, not health and education, are taking the largest cuts by a factor of 10.”

“With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.”

“A Darwinian understanding of culture begins with the observation that the arts appear in every human society and yield intense delight. When evolutionary psychologists detect those qualities, bells start ringing. Universal appearance of a behavior sometimes leads scientists to infer that it evolved before our ancestors’ diaspora from Africa 60,000 years ago (e.g., walking upright).”

“The New York State Summer School of the Arts, a 40-year-old, state-subsidized program that offers training in theater, dance, music and visual arts, may have to cut its budget by as much as half this year because of the state’s budget crisis and, in particular, the drop-off in real estate transactions.”