Category: issues

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has come out with its annual report on anti-Catholicism; the arts section lists 18 plays that contain “anti-Catholic motifs,” including one work by Nobel prize-winning author Dario Fo. The league objected to Fo’s play, which depicts “Pope John Paul II as endorsing birth control and drug legalization after ‘being confronted with thousands of third world orphans.’ Fo’s pope also suffers from paranoia, and is under the care of a witch doctor.” – Backstage

Bush, Gore. Any coincidence that the two presidential candidates have one-syllable last names? Some linguistics think not. One simple explanation: short names “are processed more quickly by our brains and cause a more positive reaction.” (Apparently ‘Bradley’ and ‘McCain’ were too much for American minds.) – Chicago Tribune

According to a statement from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, U.S. states plan to spend a record $396 million, more than $30 million more than last year, to promote the arts. The combined states’ spending dwarfs the $100 million annual budget of the NEA. – New Jersey Online (AP)

Beneath the pleasantries attending the opening of the European Fine Art Fair, an undercurrent of worry. The buzz is about how the art markets might change with the investigation of auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s. – New York Times

Record profits and good times defined the past few years in the art auction business. But the prosperity might have been an unsustainable illusion for auction giants Sotheby’s and Christie’s. “Their old-money monopoly on taste had been unraveling for years, as the Internet began to make buying-by-bid both digital and – gasp – democratic.” – New York Magazine

One actor’s disappointing odyssey from theater to film. “These ‘creative people’ never went to writing school, acting school or storytelling school and have no idea what is happening in the communities of North America, let alone the world. But they sure know how to sell some Nikes, boy.” – The Nation

They can barely afford bus fare. But “the junior stylists, assistant editors, associate marketing managers, and assorted other aspiring media executives, mostly middle-class and private-college-educated, spend their days greasing the wheels of Manhattan’s entertainment-industrial complex.” Their salaries are real-world modest, forcing ingenuity in their personal budgets. But they “spend their nights at Pastis, wrapped in trade-price Burberry scarves, chatting on loaner StarTACs, or in clients’ courtside Knicks seats drinking expensed Bud Lights,” all courtesy of the clients trying to woo their favors. – New York Magazine

“Sophisticated gallery-goers are now armored gallery-goers, afraid of trusting their instincts. Worse yet, they are afraid of their conflicting instincts–of their wish for some clarity of form, and then for something else. Yet what is wrong with asking artists for layers, for ambiguities? If we are afraid to ask artists for anything much, this may be because we are worried about getting in too deep, about being forced to revise our ideas. By now there is an unwillingness to think about underlying issues – about factors that run through all art. This unwillingness casts a pall over gallery-going.” – The New Republic

In our still-glowing economy, where technology-crazed consumers are snapping up purple iMac’s and falling for bubbled cars, high style design is no longer just for the elite. “Where design used to be considered vaguely precious, the province of the Sub-Zero-refrigerator-owning elite, it’s now available to all – from the crowd that shops at Target to those aesthetes who can pick out an Enzo Mari from 20 paces.”  Pardon me, but what is the definition of “high style” these days, anyway? – Time

“No corporation will tell you it buys art as an investment. Art isn’t liquid enough for most companies, and there’s no real tax advantage to collecting. What really happens is that the nature of physical space calls for you to put things on the wall. But if you can put things up that increase in value, that’s a good financial investment. Why put up hotel art when, for relatively little more, you can invest in your community and in a point of view?” – Chicago Tribune