Category: issues

“Media freedom organization PEN is giving China a failing grade on free expression one month before the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Conditions for both international and Chinese journalists have deteriorated between December 2007 and June 2008, according to a report released Tuesday by PEN Canada, the PEN American Centre, and the Independent Chinese PEN Centre.”

The Columbus Symphony may be folding up its tent, but other arts groups in the city are apparently doing just fine. “Most notably, Opera Columbus, hampered by a $1.2 million debt only two years ago, has ended its season with a surplus… And BalletMet Columbus, whose leaders about a week ago feared ending the fiscal year with the company’s first major deficit, will balance its budget after all.”

“The reality is that critics are creatures of their particular time and place, that even the most rarefied criticism is at its core opinion shaped by all the personal and societal forces that shape anyone’s taste. Just as you can’t be wrong or right if you prefer Italian food to Chinese, it’s hard to be right or wrong about what we like in a film, no matter how much we think we can.”

“The popularisation of modern art in Britain over the past 10 years has never seemed so real as it does here, in a small Welsh town with a school that teaches pupils about Chuck Close and Jasper Johns. Is this, as some might say, indicative of the tyranny of conceptualism? Shouldn’t kids be learning proper drawing? But I’ve seen them do plenty of proper drawing. The way art is taught here seems liberating and inspiring.”

“It’s trying to say actually how do we make good choices – and that’s partly through expert systems and algorithms,” says Peter Gabriel. “It’s also partly through people that we trust – friends, experts – so we’re trying to integrate a system which takes the best of man and machine.”

“It is not acceptable to have merely transactional relationships with patrons, to create artistic experiences and sell or give them away without regard for the capacity of people to receive them and find meaning in them. Audience development is not about derrieres in chairs but about brokering a relationship between people and art. To do that job well, organisations must be open to the ways that art and artists are changing and the ways that society is changing.”

“The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District has awarded $1.4 billion to metro-area arts organizations since 1989, but the recent severing of one of its longest and smallest beneficiaries marks a sea change in the way tax dollars will now be doled out to all Denver County arts organizations. Now, what you do for your community counts more than what you do for your audience’s souls.”

“In order to cover the combined $1.8 million in annual operating deficits among Actors Theatre, Kentucky Opera, the Louisville Ballet and the Louisville Orchestra, the fund needed to grow its campaign from $8 million to $10 million. So as of this past June 30, we’re halfway to that goal. A year goes by, and — assuming that the $10 million mark is reached — what then?”

“Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.”

“They always wanted to get rid of me, and they finally succeeded,” Francis Menotti said in his first extensive interview since his ouster in November as director of the Festival of Two Worlds here. “They did everything they could to remove the festival from me. They isolated me from my staff. They bullied my staff. They withheld funds.”