Category: today’s top story

New York City is changing the way it funds the arts, increasing overall funding but making grants merit-based and subject to a peer-review process. City funding will also be consolidated within the Department of Cultural Affairs, rather than being spread out among several departments. “The hope is that arts groups will find it less necessary to appeal to their council representatives for small amounts of financing.”

The language of the past decade “allows us not to talk about the increasingly rigid partition of our society along class lines. For as we enthusiastically fine-tune our sensibilities about how cultural or racial groupings can best be spoken about or symbolized, most social goods in our country–health care, affordable housing and higher education, income support, a living wage–drift further and further out of reach for many ordinary Americans.”

The Pittsburgh Symphony is abandoning its three-headed leadership model with the just-announced appointment of Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck as its next music director. “His three-year contract begins in fall 2008, when the contracts of conductors Andrew Davis, Yan Pascal Tortelier and Marek Janowski expire.”

“New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge. … (M)agical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.”

“Foundations have long been, for good and ill, the least accountable major institutions in America.” They “operate within an insulated culture that tolerates an inappropriate level of secrecy and even arrogance in their treatment of grant-seekers, grant-receivers, the wider civic sector, and the public officials charged with oversight. This needs to change.”

The era of the dictatorial conductor has been over for decades, and musicians now play a large role in setting the direction of many orchestras in the U.S. and Europe. “With power, of course, comes its misuse. No one wants to go back to the old orchestral days of part-time employment, miserable pay and little or no benefits; the days of sexism, racism and exploitation; days of imperious conductors doling out abuse. Still, a couple of uppity American orchestras have gotten out of hand.”

“Once upon a time, the market and the scene (clubiness, chicanery, and profligacy notwithstanding) were joined and reflected social, political, and sexual change. Now the market is only in service of itself. The market is a perfect storm of hocus-pocus, spin, and speculation, a combination slave market, trading floor, disco, theater, and brothel where an insular ever-growing caste enacts rituals in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight.”

“In a move that seemed to gratify prosecutors, lawyers for [former Getty curator Marion True, on trial in Rome for antiquities theft,] asked on Wednesday that the court admit as evidence a letter in which the curator railed against her former employer… The prosecutor leading Italy’s investigation, Paolo Ferri, said the letter presented in Ms. True’s defense worked against her by suggesting that she had knowingly taken part in acquisitions of illicit artifacts.”

“Although today’s FCC is nowhere near as controlling as earlier FCCs, it still treats the radio spectrum like a scarce resource that its bureaucrats must manage for the “public good,” even though the government’s scarcity argument has been a joke for half a century or longer. The almost uniformly accepted modern view is that information-carrying capacity of the airwaves isn’t static, that capacity is a function of technology and design architecture that inventors and entrepreneurs throw at spectrum.”

“How is it that jazz has become the vehicle for the resurgence of robust music programs in the schools while classical music, and its offspring (arguably US) still find it a challenge to be seen as relevant to arts education in the United States? Perhaps it is because jazz is an honest child of the arts in American culture and is taking back its true inheritance.”