Category: issues

Minnesotans will be voting Tuesday on a constitutional amendment to dedicate significant new sales tax revenue to the arts, and many in the state are wary of the idea. But Dominic Papatola says it’s vital to preserving Minnesota’s way of life: “It took decades to nurture and grow Minnesota’s unique aesthetic environment to its current point. But a recession here and ill-advised government cuts there can and will jeopardize it much faster and in as just an irreplaceable way.”

A professor writes that higher education has lost its way. “Professors and administrators seek to ‘nurture’ and ‘engage’ and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous.”

“A constitutional amendment is not the way to address state budget inequities. But the executive director of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts fears that the traditional way of doing business — competing for the attention of legislators hashing out conflicting requests — has ill-served arts groups and patrons.”

At New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, an exhibit on Irène Némirovsky – the French-Jewish-Catholic author who died at Auschwitz and whose rediscovered novel Suite Française became a bestseller several years ago – has revived a bitter debate over whether her early works featured nasty Jewish caricatures.

“A Frank Gehry-designed museum can rise in Jerusalem on a site that was once a Muslim cemetery, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled today… The $250-million project had been delayed since early 2006, when builders unearthed bones. Arab leaders in Israel sued to stop the project and were supported, in an unusual alliance, by some ultra-Orthodox Jews with firm beliefs against disturbing graves.”

“Overturning preconceptions about mental illness is the leitmotif of the eight-year-old Mind’s Museum (museodellamente.it), which reopened this month after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works mostly with interactive and video environments.”

“W. Richard West Jr., who retired last year as founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, has agreed to reimburse the Smithsonian $9,700 for payments that he should not have received.” At the same time, an internal investigation has concluded that West’s takings, while imprudent, were technically allowable under Smithsonian rules.

With the American economy in the tank, even Washington socialites are having to cut back on extravagances, and that could spell bad news for the charities and arts groups that count on a regular procession of black-tie fundraisers.

“Olympic organizers in Vancouver may be tightening purse strings during this volatile economic climate but the 2009 Olympiad arts festival will not be on the chopping block… More than 100 projects will take place during the Olympiad and 85 per cent will be by Canadian acts.”

“The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents – seventy-four per cent – say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) … [But] evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.” They’re less likely to use contraception as well. Why?