Category: issues

“The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is raffling a $2.4 million dream house, making it the most expensive home ever raffled off in California. The charming Edwardian home, [4,000 square feet] with detached guesthouse, is located just steps from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood.”

“According to new research announced today by the National Endowment for the Arts, working artists are unemployed at a higher rate than other workers, and at a rate that is rising more rapidly than other professions. Presumably as a result, more artists are leaving their profession.”

“Corporations and wealthy individuals are donating less to nonprofits, with arts groups taking the biggest hit, according to two new studies. Of 158 companies polled by the economic-research group the Conference Board in February, 45 percent said they have reduced their 2009 philanthropy budget and 16 percent are considering it. The survey said 35 percent of the companies will make fewer grants in 2009 and 22 percent are thinking about it.”

“This month, the Kennedy Center hosts hundreds of musicians, dancers, artists, writers and thinkers from the Arab world in a three-week arts festival called Arabesque. Representatives say there has never been such a gathering.” The festival, five years in the making, features artists, performers and writers from 22 countries covering an area as large as the United States.

“Instead of focusing on another country, the major festival at the Kennedy Center next year will focus on another landscape: the terrain inhabited by artists with various disabilities, from deafness to diabetes, around the world.” Other 2009-10 season highlights include visits from the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi, Cate Blanchett as Blanche in Streetcar, Jennifer Higdon’s new piano concerto, and festivals of “Ballet Across America” and “Gospel Across America.”

As a Dubai literary festival made its debut, the aborted fracas over charges of author blacklisting “led to a spotlight being turned on the prevalence of censorship in the Arab world, particularly in a state that recently jailed three journalists for defamation over offence caused by writing on the internet. … Though nobody in the censorship debate was prepared to confront the beast head on, their circumlocutions were both interesting and revealing.”

“[P]ublic sentiment shouldn’t decide whether Ticketmaster, the dominant provider of ticketing services, should be allowed to merge with Live Nation, one of the world’s largest concert promoters. Instead, we hope antitrust attorneys at the Justice Department will focus on the deal’s potential impact on event promoters, venues and artists, all of which could be hit harder by the merger than the ticket-buying public.”

Generally, websites’ excerpts of other organizations’ original content “have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information. But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work … are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.”

“A hundred years ago, in 1909, Daniel Burnham completed work on a document with the unassuming title ‘Plan of Chicago’ that remains the most effective example of large-scale urban planning America has ever seen.”