Backlash – The Creative Class

Emily Hall is happy to see that a “backlash” is building against Richard Florida’s ideas about the “creative class.” “It didn’t take much nudging for people to start to see, among other flaws in his arguments, that he meant to improve social conditions for computer programmers rather than reform the way arts are funded in this country. Florida can claim as loudly as he likes that he never meant to be an arts advocate, but as far as I can tell, he was the keynote speaker at a gazillion ‘save the arts’ conferences all over the country, probably accepting nice little fees every time.”

The A-List Actor And The Video Game

Movie stars are turning up in new video games. “A-list actors have taken notice of games, and it’s not hard to see why. They’re a quick route to digital-age street cred. Appearing in a game gives an actor a sense of being on the cutting edge of technological “convergence” (whatever that is), as well as a vague whiff of indie flava. More important, it keeps a star current among young men. Any canny star—or, more likely, any star with a canny agent—eventually winds up looking enviously at a hot video game like the Grand Theft Auto series, which is objectively cooler than almost anything that’s come out of Hollywood in years.”

LA Mayor Says Cultural Department Will Be Saved

Last week Los Angeles officials were suggesting they might abolish the city’s cultural affairs department. But “Mayor James K. Hahn said Wednesday that he would preserve the agency and maintain its popular arts grants and educational programs while finding other ways to streamline it in the face of a municipal budget crisis. Hahn said he aimed to “refocus” the department, including giving it a new mandate to pump up tourism by promoting the city’s cultural attractions.”

Gambling With Bankruptcy

“With personal bankruptcy filings at historic highs, a growing number of grass-roots organizations contend that the phenomenon is fueled, at least in part, by the explosion of legal gambling in the United States over the past quarter of a century.” And here’s data to back up the claim – a study shows that bankruptcy rates are highest where casinos are.

Is Elliott Carter Too Hard For Detroit?

When the Pacifica Quartet came to perform at the Chamber Music Society of Detroit this week, they were specifically asked not to perform the Elliott Carter quartet they had planned. Why? Fear of “alienating” subscribers. “Never mind that Carter’s Fifth (1995) is a brilliant work in the composer’s late style, muscular but communicative, full of spry dialogue and texture. Never mind that the Pacifica’s reputation is based partly on its passionate advocacy of Carter. Never mind that removing Carter to placate a few reactionary patrons drives a stake through the heart of the society’s artistic integrity and tightens the noose more securely around the future of classical music. If you do not play the music of today, to paraphrase composer Gunther Schuller, there will be no masterpieces for tomorrow.”

The Blog Niche Goes Mainstream

Blogging is no longer a mere blip on the cultural radar screen. In the last year, blog readership has nearly tripled, and bloggers focusing on everything from politics to culture to wartime survival have become fringe players in an increasingly crowded and diverse global media scene. Traditional media sources are predictably wary of bloggers, who have no obligation to follow traditional journalistic codes of conduct and who frequently bring strong biases to their work, but there’s no denying that the online journals are becoming increasingly powerful in the information-delivery game.

Elementary, My Dea… actually, it’s fairly complicated.

“The British Library is urging that the planned sale of 3,000 personal documents of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this May by auction house Christie’s in the United Kingdom be halted until a dispute over the papers’ true owners has been resolved. The British Library has argued that some of the papers… actually belongs to them since Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean Conan Doyle bequeathed some of the documents to them when she died in 1997. Meanwhile, the Toronto Public Library is concerned that the Christie’s material… might actually have been part of a legacy from Conan Doyle’s daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, who left five items to the library’s Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, the largest publicly accessible collection of Conan Doyle items in the world.”

ROM To Get $25 Million Gift

Canada’s second-wealthiest family is set to announce a major gift to the Royal Ontario Museum, which is in the planning stages of a CAN$200 million expansion project. Galen and Hilary Weston will contribute as much as CAN$25 million to the ROM’s capital campaign, a donation which will buy the Westons the naming rights to at least some part of the new expansion. The contribution means that the ROM should have all the cash it needs to go ahead with the first phase of its expansion.