Is a current review of Scottish arts policy currently underway just a front for killing off the Scottish Arts Council? A Government memo would suggest that it might be. “The secret memo confirms the suspicions of cultural policy insiders who believe the Executive has always had an agenda to scrap the arts organisation, which has been widely tipped for abolition in the forthcoming shake-up.”
Tag: 04.10.05
Minnesota Legislators Freeze Out Arts Requests
Is the appetite of government to fund arts capital projects fading? “Minnesota arts groups were all but frozen out of the $945 million bonding bill passed by the Legislature this week, a halting step in what has been an awkward minuet between ambitious artists and a sometimes-skeptical state government.”
Heinz Kerry Makes Surprise Gift To Warhol Museum
Theresa Heinz Kerry (wife of 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry) surprised the staff and management of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum with a $4 million endowment gift this weekend. The donation will go a long way toward helping the museum, “Pittsburgh’s lively, provocative hub of contemporary art and popular culture,” achieve its overall endowment goal of $35 million.
What’s Wrong With Humana?
What ails Louisville’s venerable Humana Theatre Festival? Michael Phillips thinks it might be something as simple as a lack of competition for contemporary American drama. “The festival would [also] benefit from writers with a sense of honest, vital political engagement with our country today. This year the protestations amounted to a soapbox derby of speechifying, not entirely uninteresting but not persuasively dramatic.”
The Rise Of Black British Jazz
The era of globalization has done wonders for jazz, broadening its language and bringing new ideas to a genre that had become the province, mainly, of academic-minded American practitioners with very narrow musical values. “One of the new paradigms comes from a circle of mostly black London-based musicians… So what do these new players have? The first answer is a British Afro-Caribbean identity. The second is a movement. They have come together around several guiding ideas: swing, blues feeling, the historical relationship of reggae and jazz, and a commitment to improving stereotypes of Afro-Caribbeans and black Britain in general. The third answer is summed up in a term that’s become fairly widespread among these musicians, as well as the English press: black British jazz.”
Bridging Broadway’s Gender Gap
The Monty Python-inspired musical, Spamalot, is more than just the latest Broadway smash. It’s an actual piece of legitimate musical theatre that has succeeded in attracting a traditionally elusive demographic on Broadway: men.
Dancing & Motherhood: Not Necessarily Opposing Values
Ballet is notorious for its devotion to (some would say obsession with) the “perfect” female form. So pregnancy must mean the end of the line, at least temporarily for a ballerina, right? Wrong. “Today dancing during pregnancy and after childbirth, once a privilege of only the grandest stars, is unexceptional. But the fact remains that for dancers who become pregnant, the body is an instrument of art as well as of motherhood, and those roles can sometimes clash.”
Liverpool Poets (Not Named John, Paul, George & Ringo)
Liverpool is the UK’s Cultural Capital designate for 2008, and just to prove it deserves the moniker, the city is hosting its first-ever poetry festival this week. The event will include a reading in the crypt of the city’s central Roman Catholic Cathedral, as well as workshops for budding poets and readings by several of the city’s best-known poets.
Walker Expansion Almost Complete
When the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis’s popular avant-garde museum, set out to design a major addition to its building, it wanted the architecture to reflect the center’s commitment to art that doesn’t necessarily fit the traditional mold, but didn’t want a building that would seem out of place in the Walker’s existing neighborhood, which includes idyllic parks, historic churches, and a massive sculpture garden. The new addition, designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, opens next weekend, “the first in a string of high-profile projects among Minneapolis cultural heavyweights to be completed. The Guthrie Theater, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Children’s Theater complex and a new downtown library with planetarium are all in progress on expansion or relocation efforts of their own.”
Expanded Form, Expanded Function
“Much of what distinguishes the expanded Walker won’t even be seen by visitors. The complex sits atop an underground labyrinth that includes a 670-stall parking ramp and a network of art storage rooms, frame shops, photo labs and corridors linking the old and new buildings. Huge elevators will carry art from an enclosed loading dock at the south end of the complex to a 14-foot-tall subterranean corridor that parallels Hennepin Avenue. From it, art can be trollied into storage rooms or elevated nine or more stories to the top of the original Walker, one block north.”