Category: issues

“The Smithsonian Institution’s noncompetitive contract giving a Massachusetts travel agency exclusive use of the Smithsonian name continues to anger other agencies two years after the deal was first struck. The deal has been good for the Cambridge, Mass., tourist firm.”

“Gaiety was in shorter supply than usual at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. It was as if pessimism at the end of the new Labour boom, stasis in Iraq and the rise of those old monsters, Russia and the Tory party, had filtered existential panic back on to the stage.”

“A protest yesterday in Montreal drew 2,500 people and some of the strongest condemnations yet of almost $45-million in planned cuts to arts-and-culture funding, just as the National Ballet of Canada’s top brass voiced their concerns in a letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.”

“Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Montreal on Wednesday to protest government cuts to arts and culture programs. Artists, singers, actors, writers and politicians spoke out against some $48.5 million in funding cuts announced by the Conservative government earlier this summer.”

“European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water with a knife. Joseph Horowitz says that Stokowski’s dream of a democratic high culture never arrived. But it couldn’t, because such a thing, as an aim, can exist only in theory. In practice, a successful artistic event deals with the anomaly by removing it.”

Karen Kain, artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, has written to Prime Minister Stephen Harper with a plea not to stop showcasing Canadian artists abroad.

“What this government has also done in that area, as it’s done across the government, is we’ve instituted an expenditure-management system, where over a period of five years we comprehensively review every program and we make sure that we’re spending on priorities and spending on those programs that are most effective. Some programs in arts and culture have increased in funding, others have gone down – in total it’s gone up.”

“Although nearly forgotten, the Olympics held from 1912 through 1948 included arts competitions, with the winners receiving the same gold, silver and bronze medals as the athletes. The arts competition debuted at the 1912 Games in Stockholm where an American, Walter Winans, won the gold for sculpture. But he didn’t stop there.”

ArtsJournal is expanding, and I need some help. I’m looking for a part time editor. The job involves culling stories from the publications we monitor (basically anything about the arts in English, worldwide) and choosing 10-15 stories per shift to feature on AJ. Details after the jump…

“Good criticism extends the life of a play perhaps not in the number of performances, but by helping to continue the dialogue after the curtain comes down and the actors go home for the night. Good criticism should be a reminder to audiences that theater was interactive millennia before the Internet and that audiences have their own responsibility in this art form, one that goes beyond making sure their check to the box office doesn’t bounce.”