Category: issues

The arts are booming in Los Angeles. There are 1,100 arts groups active – new theatres are starting, new buildings being built, and the city is getting a reputation for its new music and visual arts. But next to the monolithic Hollywood entertainment machine, the arts can seem invisible. So many of the artists have gotten together to promote themselves. – Los Angeles Times

Theft of artwork has become a major international problem. The British government wants to do something about it. But first – just how big a problem is it? No one seems to know for sure. – The Telegraph (UK)

Is the New Zealand government ignoring Maori arts? Critics charge that “compared with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Maori arts were ‘under-funded, under-utilised and virtually unrecognised.'” – New Zealand Herald

Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura meets with students and talks about his veto of a bill awarding Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre money for a new home. “You can talk all you want, but can the Guthrie get the ratings that wrestling gets? Because ratings transfer to money. You can put the Guthrie on TV, and if nobody watches it, no advertisers are going to pay to see it. People watch wrestling.” – St. Paul Pioneer Press

What determines the differences between “high” and “low” art? Hard to tell anymore.  “It is so difficult to evaluate arts, compare their virtues and weigh their achievements and the entire debate over what was once called high culture is so politically charged that it is tempting simply to say that different entertainments attract different audiences. No aesthetic distinctions are needed. Mozart and Spears do not have different statures, just different devotees. There is no high, no low, only differing cultural attitudes toward what is high and what is low.” – New York Times

Neil MacGregor, director of London’s National Gallery, has criticized the UK government’s recent euphoria over much-publicized museum and gallery openings, including the Tate Modern. Striking at the Government’s boast that it had increased access, Mr. MacGregor said: “There may be more access; but it is access to ignorance.” – The Independent (UK)

Charleston’s Spoleto Festival is hurting. A boycott protesting South Carolina’s flying of the Confederate flag is having its effect. “Overall ticket sales are down 20 percent and group sales down 45 percent from last year. ‘The silence of artists is the most painful thing for me,’ said Spoleto’s general manager and director, Nigel Redden, who has argued to his artists that they should register their opinions through their performances, not their absence.” – Newark Star-Ledger

The AFL-CIO’s national leaders have publicly backed the month-long actors strike being waged in New York and Los Angeles against the commercial production industry. – Backstage

New Yorkers are frantically jockeying to pay $500 to $1,000 for Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s stone lions to solve their feng shui woes. “It’s difficult to get one of Mr. Cai’s lions. Some museum goers just don’t have enough bad energy. Some keep returning to the Whitney to reapply, even though only 27 of 99 of the Cai (pronounced “sigh”) lions remain unreserved. They put on their best co-op board-meeting faces to enter into a process that plays on some basic New York neuroses: the need to succeed, the impulse to throw money at a new trend and the urge to make the apartment a thing of beauty.” – New York Observer

Hispanics make up 11.5 percent of the US population but “rarely occupy more than 2 percent of the available jobs in the film and television industry,” according to a study by the Screen Actors Guild. Minorities have tried to make their case to Hollywood as a social cause. “Studio executives will lend half an ear to a social case, but the bottom line is that the corporate suites are running a business, and business is about profits or potential profits. Develop a business case, and you will bring about change.” – Dallas Morning News (AP)