Category: issues

On the eve of a major redevelopment of Lincoln Center, its president resigns. Norman Leventhal can’t take credit for all the artistic successes in his 17 years running America’s premiere arts campus, but he helped transform the institution into a year-round destination and helped diversify its programming. – New York Times

Nathan Leventhal announced he would step down as president of Lincoln Center after nearly 17 at the helm. His departure “comes at a crucial time for the center, which is considering a $1.5 billion campaign to upgrade its 40-year-old 11-acre campus.” – New York Times

As part of Eastern Connecticut University’s “Alternative Restitution Program,” students committing infractions on campus may now choose their course of punishment; community service … or an opera performance. It’s hard to predict what results this program will have on its subjects, but it certainly can’t be the best way to send a positive message about the arts to young people. “This business of opera as punishment may be the worst thing to hit classical music since the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, which juxtaposed Beethoven with coldblooded violence.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

The Boston Museum of Art sent out a letter to educators last week saying they would no longer be able to access the museum’s slide library for use in their classes. The slides, which are used in senior and community centers to educate the public about the MFA’s collection, are being stashed while the museum focuses its energies on putting digitized images on its Web site. A discouraged teacher laments, ending “‘rental privileges for slides from the MFA slide collection takes away our most valuable teaching tool, and the loss of this tool will result in the cancellation of many of our courses,”’ and possibly the loss of the 15,000 – 30,000 new MFA customers each year. – Boston Globe

Word is that the spring’s auction house sales will be as strong as ever in a robust market, despite investigations of Sotheby’s/Christie’s. – New York Times

Britain’s museums don’t have the acquisition resources of their American counterparts. So the government set up a plan that allows estates faced with paying large sums of inheritance tax to settle part of these bills by handing over works of art in lieu of money to the Government. These are passed to institutions such as the Tate Gallery or the National Gallery. It’s been a boon to museums. – The Telegraph (UK)

As NEA money for the arts has dried up in America, should we be surprised that private financing interests have moved in and that charges of conflict of interest are being leveled at museums and theaters?  Robert Brustein writes that: “the high arts have become an endangered species in this country, being picked off by a variety of sharpshooters, including commercial producers, populists, politicians, multi-culturalists, middlebrow critics and, not least of all, the foundations. At the event celebrating thirty-five years of the NEA, I imagined that I saw the heads of many of those extinct animals mounted on the walls, under a plaque designated ‘Art with a capital `A.” – New Republic

If wealthy collectors can claim tax breaks when they donate art to museums, why shouldn’t artists get the same deal? The director of the Whitney takes on the cause. – Los Angeles Times

It hasn’t been lost on anyone that New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is in the middle of a hot campaign for election to the US Senate. Artist Hans Haacke’s artwork for the Whitney Biennial makes fun of the mayor, but does it achieve anything? – Washington Post

Heads of the national arts and humanities endowments testify that they desperately need the funding increases proposed by the Clinton administration. “We have a dramatic inability to fund projects,” they said before the appropriations committee. – Washington Post