“Unlike other Jewish museums around the country, this one, founded in 1984 and formerly housed in modest quarters on Steuart Street, doesn’t collect objects, have a permanent collection or focus on the Holocaust. It puts on contemporary exhibitions and programs exploring Jewish art and culture from many viewpoints, involving Jewish and non-Jewish artists and audiences.”
Category: issues
Taming The Edinburgh Fringe
“The age-old battle cries about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe being too risqué (from bestiality to bible bashing, take your pick) have been joined in recent years by growing fears that the once spontaneous has become too commercial.”
Online Learning – But How Do We Protect Our Brand?
“Even as information technology is changing our economy in ways that make exclusive college degrees ever more valuable, it’s also giving institutions like Yale new opportunities to be less exclusive, by educating people at a distance. This creates an ethical dilemma for Yale and its ilk. Hoarding intellectual resources in an era where they can be distributed far and wide at no cost seems selfish and counter to the spirit of higher education. But distributing those resources too far and wide could undermine the exclusivity on which Yale’s fame and fortune are based.”
A Matter Of Survival – The Arts In A Digital World
“Countless recent studies have coalesced around the same conclusion: Participation in the performing arts is changing drastically and, in many cases, declining. Fewer people are going to operas, plays and dance performances, according to the federal government’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. That decline is even more pronounced among 18- to 24-year-olds.”
How We Wrecked The Cities
“European cities are going the way of cities in America: high-rise offices in the center, surrounded first by a ring of lawless dereliction, and then by the suburbs, to which those who work in the city flee at the end of the day. Admittedly, nothing in Europe compares with the vandalism that modernists have wreaked on Buffalo, Tampa, or Minneapolis. Nevertheless, the same moral disaster is beginning to afflict us–the disaster of cities in which no one wishes to live, where public spaces are vandalized and private spaces boarded up.”
Obscenity Charges Dropped In Sydney Art Case
“Australian police have dropped an obscenity investigation into photos of nude children at an art gallery that sparked a major debate on censorship… Police had shut the exhibit hours before it was to open and confiscated dozens of portraits of naked adolescent boys and girls.”
Arts Festivals – It Ain’t Easy Being Green
“From the massive amounts of energy needed to move people to and from festival sites to the mammoth stage lights and speaker towers to the mountains of concert programs and water bottles that get tossed in the trash — the only “green” connected with the festival experience may be the grass audiences sit on. Some festivals are attempting to minimize the damage.”
Linz As European Capital Of Culture? Really? Somebody Check The Calendar?
“By some quirk of Brussels chicanery or a triple ironic bypass after a liquid lunch, Linz has been chosen to succeed Liverpool as Europe’s artistic hub for the year 2009. It’s a decision beyond satire, or reason. Even if there were cultural grounds for celebrating Linz – and there are some – someone on an EU salary should surely have spotted that 2009 is the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s war and the 120th of his birth.”
Europe Warming Up To American-Style Fundraising
“The very notion of hitting up private companies and rich people for money, of setting up boards of trustees and answering to them, the way American cultural organizations do, appalled” many in Europe’s cultural sphere only a few years ago. But times are changing, and as government subsidies dwindle, arts groups across Europe are clamoring for private funds.
A Financial Model For The Arts That Works
“Here at the very heart of subsidized Europe, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden is a nonprofit venture, or the German equivalent without American-style tax breaks. It receives not a cent of public money, save for a long-term payoff for the construction of its 2,500-seat hall.” Here is an “example should make everyone, on both sides of the Atlantic, think twice about cultural economics and the costs of achieving true quality in the arts.”