Category: issues

“Those who object to the violent, sexist or otherwise ugly images in movies tend to seek censorship, either by the industry itself or by legislation. I agree that movies, music, television programs and all privately funded works of art must be protected against censorship without regard to their content. But I also agree with those who say that the content of a lot of current art, including popular film, feeds an ongoing moral decay in our culture.” – Los Angeles Times 08/28/00

“For reasons no one has satisfactorily explained, a few well-placed, influential men – apparently chief among them J. Carter Brown, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, and Bob Dole, former senator and Republican presidential nominee, now national campaign chairman of the World War II Memorial – are hellbent not merely on building a memorial but on building one of surpassing ugliness and placing it right in the heart of the National Mall.” – Washington Post 08/28/00

“Ten years after Congress ordered American Indian remains returned to their tribes, only 10 percent of the up to 200,000 remains estimated to be in public collections are even officially inventoried, federal records show.” – Chicago Tribune 08/28/00

When the modern Olympics were revived in 1896, artists, musicians, and writers competed for medals right alongside the athletes, just as they had done in ancient Greece. The practice was dropped in 1948, but host cities are still required to present an arts festival along with the sporting events. Although a lack of sponsorship and poor ticket sales have dampened Sydney’s plans for next month’s event at the Summer Games, the lineup is still impressive – 70% of the artists involved are Australian. – The Sunday Times (UK) 08/27/00

Gallery and museum attendance in Korea is down in recent years due to a popular view of fine arts as “pretentiously ritzy, untouchably high culture, and shamelessly time-consuming.” So what are curators and arts marketers doing to bolster attendance? “Holding exhibitions in the unlikeliest places in town – cemeteries, trains, warehouses, subway stations and local streets – for the very purpose of winning converts to the fine arts.” – Korea Herald 08/27/00

“High” culture is wildly popular right now, and isn’t that what artists have been fighting for? “Public enthusiasm for art, music, theater, and dance is raising some highbrow eyebrows, however. Academics, connoisseurs, and critics maintain that as arts organizations market themselves to draw new audiences, the quality of their offerings has been ‘dumbed down’. ‘Popularity is not necessarily a measure of success in the arts.”  Too many institutions are compromising their standards as they scramble to respond to ‘bottom-line pressures that reared their ugly heads in the 1990s’.” – Boston Globe 08/27/00

The arts are booming in Singapore, according to a new report. “Performance arts activities jumped from 1,500 in 1989 to 3,800 in 1999. For visual arts, the number of exhibitions went up from 212 to 406 in the same period.” – Singapore News 08/27/00

“In recent times, it has become an unwritten rule of the Olympics that each opening ceremony should go faster, higher and further than the one before. Lighting the cauldron has become not so much a simple emblem as an increasingly emotional focal point for the games. After the heart-stopping moment in Barcelona when an archer lit the cauldron with a flaming arrow, Atlanta pulled off another coup in 1996, when Muhammad Ali, willed on by the world, lit it with visibly shaking hands. Now the pressure is on Sydney to top them both.” – The Sunday Times (UK)

What is it about being shocked that artists and viewers find so…invigorating? “Notoriously, ever since the dawn of Impressionism, modern art has delivered the shock of the new. Whether you find it a bracing blast of novelty or a dastardly attack on everything sacred is partly a matter of temperament – and taste.” – The Telegraph (UK)

In August the Australian government agreed to $70 million in additional funding to Australian arts groups. But agreement about how the money will be spent has been held up in a spat over $47,000 between the arts minister for Victoria and the federal government. – The Age (Melbourne)