Category: issues

One of the primary performing arts venues in the city is about to be 30% more expensive to rent, and the Charleston Symphony is staggering through what it calls “the worst year in history.” And no one sounds optimistic about next year, either.

A brouhaha has broken out over changes on the vocabulary included in the latest version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. New additions include blog, broadband, bilingual and biodegradable. Fair enough. But missing from the children’s reference are monarch, duchess and coronation; altar, bishop and vicar; and beetroot, marzipan and porridge. Even moss and fern are gone. OUP points out that today’s UK is much less rural and more multicultural than in the past, and that “We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it.”

“In London, arts institutions have figured out that they need to be gathering places as much–if not more–than producers of cultural events. It is a win-win transformation. The provision of a relaxed, open, public space fills a social mission, but it also fills the coffers. … All of this makes one wonder why Chicago is so pathetic in this crucial regard.”

Of Paris: “The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged.” But Havana? “What has been preserved with it, thanks to socialist economic disaster, is that very pungent texture Paris has lost to modernity.”

Liverpool’s year as Europe’s Capital of Culture is drawing to a close, so what can residents of the city expect of their local cultural scene in 2009? “It will feel like the night after a party. But we all know what that’s like. We have to take the experience and memory and build on it.”

Swiss megabank UBS is responsible for funding dozens of major orchestras and other arts groups, and it also bankrolls a good chunk of Art Basel Miami Beach. That makes the company a favorite of arts supporters, but with the economy in the toilet and UBS under investigation for helping certain rich folks hide their money, it makes both the bank and the arts a target for investigative reporters.

“A gay version of the Bible, in which God says it is better to be gay than straight, is to be published by an American film producer. New Mexico-based Revision Studios will publish The Princess Diana Bible – so named because of Diana’s ‘many good works’, it says – online at princessdianabible.com in spring 2009. A preview of Genesis is already available, in which instead of creating Adam and Eve, God creates Aida and Eve.”

“Mark Nerenhausen, who for the past decade has led the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will be the president and CEO of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, officials announced Thursday.” The $354 million Center, which opens next October, includes the new Winspear Opera House, Wyly Theatre, Annette Strauss Artist Square and City Performance Hall, all designed by marquee architects.

While municipal spending on libraries (along with everything else) is down these days, spending on CDs and DVDs is rising. Rem Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library “showed that good design and new services could make the library an attraction to rival galleries and cinemas.” The old Whitechapel Library in London was replaced by the Whitechapel Idea Store, which “boasts a crèche, CD and DVD lending and, most essentially, free internet access. Is calling it an ‘Idea Store’ a piece of New Labour marketing or a genuine attempt to demystify the library and make it open to new users?… Librarians now find themselves having to act as guides not just to information itself, but to the myriad ways of accessing it that are available.”

“As a follow-up to its report ‘Artists in the Workforce, 1990-2005,’ released in June, the National Endowment for the Arts is releasing today the results of a closer examination of the gender pay gap between men and women artists discovered by the original study. Surprise — women artists earn less.”