Category: issues

There’s a federal election going on in Canada, and the Liberal party, in power for a number of years now, is offering a bribe to the arts – $600 million in new arts spending, if the government is re-elected. Artists aren’t impressed, though. The government’s made promises before, but hasn’t come through. – CBC 11/03/00

Scotland’s arts groups, languishing for funding in recent years, got a pick-me-up this week, in the form of the “largest-ever increase in funding for the arts in Scotland. The £27 million package was revealed at the opening of the hastily rescheduled debate on the National Arts Strategy and its substance caught its beneficiaries, as well as its detractors, on the hop.” – The Herald (Scotland) 11/03/00

High-tech artwork is gaining more mainstream acceptance in the art world, yet artists themselves are still struggling with ways to navigate between the worlds of art and technology, both of which are crucial to their creative output. The collaboration between the two will be a focus of this week’s “.art frontiers” conference in Silicon Valley. – Wired 11/01/00

Securing grants for future projects is about to become a lot easier for England’s artists after a recent promise by the Arts Council of England to simplify the funding-distribution process and reduce the layers of red tape artists have traditionally had to cut through. – BBC 11/01/00

A debate is going on in Australia about how to best spend money on higher education. “While Australia’s best universities are well below Ivy League status, the lower end of the spectrum is well above America’s worst.” If making the best schools truly great isn’t easily possible, should effort be made at general improvement? (In which case the best are diminished while the worst improve). – Sydney Morning Herald 11/01/00

A Taipei official has pledged to make the city “the cultural city of the Asia-Pacific,” beginning with a year-long arts festival of work from 10 nearby countries. “The Europeans know their neighbors well – they learn each others’ languages, histories, and literature and they work together to form a cultural power house. Someday, perhaps, our children will not only learn English and French and German but also confidently speak Vietnamese and Korean, read Sanskrit and write Chinese.” – China Times (Taiwan) 10/31/00

At a forum on the future of the arts, Australian artists launch “a withering attack on the government, the arts media, populism and the boards of the performing arts companies. One cited the image of Nicky Webster’s ‘Dream’ at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics as a metaphor for a bland and hypocritical culture that says it embraces diversity but does otherwise. ‘You cannot present to the world your culture as the dream of a white 10-year-old school girl’.” – The Age (Melbourne) 10/31/00

Spending by philanthropies on arts and culture increased by 47 percent last year, reports the Journal of Philanthropy in its annual ranking of the Philanthropy 400. Philanthropic support for arts and culture organizations on the list totaled $1.15 billion last year. Overall charities took in 14 percent more last year than the year before. (table at the end of story) – Chronicle of Philanthropy 10/30/00

• “The modern city is a city of contradictions….it houses many ethnes, many cultures, many religions. [It] is too fragmentary, too full of contrast and strife; it must therefore have many faces, not one…. The lack of any coherent, explicit, image may therefore, in our circumstances, be a positive virtue, not a fault, or even a problem.” – The New Republic 10/30/00

“‘A History of Britain with Simon Schama’, is this year’s big-budget blow-out to maintain the BBC’s stature as the carrier of High Knowledge. Now it’s time to come home, to let history put the Great back into Great Britain. Great, because every step of Schama’s grand tour of digs and cathedrals, battlefields and museums, is filled with self- congratulation. Self-congratulation for the historian, for the corporation and, above all, the ‘nation’.” But can we trust it? – New Statesman 10/30/00