Category: issues

“Overall attendance and income for Saratoga Performing Arts Center’s classical programs fell 9 percent this year… Philadelphia Orchestra and Freihofer’s Jazz Festival both experienced 16 percent attendance declines, while New York City Ballet was down 6 percent and Saratoga Chamber Music Festival 2 percent. The orchestra suffered a 21-percent drop in revenues.”

“The major projects include a World Shakespeare Festival, which is to be spearheaded by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Critics have voiced fears that the events may follow the pattern of the handover ceremony in Beijing, which, with its song and dance routine and its brief appearance by David Beckham, was derided as kitsch in some quarters.”

“The Olympiad will go heavy on illegitimate cultural pride. There will be ’12 cutting-edge artists’ commissions across the UK’. The Olympiad so wants to identify with British art that Sebastian Coe is to run shortly in the Martin Creed relay at Tate Britain. Yeah, we’re the artists of the world. What did America or France ever produce to rival our artists now?”

“Supporters of arts and culture rallied last night in a sweltering downtown Toronto theatre to denounce more than $40 million in recent cuts to programs by the Harper government and to strategize on ways to defeat Conservative members of Parliament in the impending election.”

“A William Shakespeare festival and 12 new public works of art will form part of a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ planned for the run-up to the 2012 London games. Set up to showcase Britain’s arts and culture, the four-year programme will comprise 500 events designed to involve and inspire people at home and abroad.”

“For Northerners, the history of the Civil War seems pretty much settled. [But] things are interpreted more ambiguously here in what once was the capital of the Confederate States of America… Institutions here — the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War Center — argue that the war should be seen, at least in part, from the perspective of the losing side, and that such understanding need not be completely derailed by the moral outrage of slavery.”

“This summer, Lincoln Center, the largest performing arts complex in the country, has been a maze of construction sites, plywood fencing and confusing detours.” Apparently, things are so confusing that people attending performances are actually having trouble finding the entrance.

“We live in an age of conspicuous documentation. As digital cameras have proliferated, picture-taking has become compulsive: It is as if people fear that moments won’t exist unless they’ve been reduced to bits. No transgression goes undocumented, no inebriation goes unpublicized and no child goes un-camcorded.”

“Make no mistake, Denver is getting noticed by the larger art world. Indeed, certain insiders in places like New York might have a better handle on the dramatic changes sweeping the city’s art scene than some members of the general public here.”

“In the past decade, as artists and as cultural consumers, we’ve been encouraged to be more relaxed about the relationship between art and commerce. In a previous era, Warhol’s work ironically questioned culture’s claim to unique purity. But Warhol had a complex mixture of fascination and disgust with both consumerism and celebrity. In contrast, a contemporary artist seems to have a vision indistinguishable from the sensibilities of the celebrity magazine and the advertising agency.”