Tag: 06.14.03

Gioia: Better Times Ahead

NEA chairman Dana Gioia spoke to the Theatre Communications Group meeting in Milwaukee last week and said he “took the NEA chairmanship on the condition that President Bush was committed to rebuilding the agency, and he pointed to a 50% increase in NEA theater funding this year as evidence that better times are ahead.”

TV Disrupts The Himalayas

“In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television. The Dragon King had lifted a ban on the small screen as part of a radical plan to modernise his country, and those who could afford the £4-a-month subscription signed up in their thousands to a cable service that provided 46 channels of round-the-clock entertainment, much of it from Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV network. Four years on, those same subscribers are beginning to accuse television of smothering their unique culture, of promoting a world that is incompatible with their own, and of threatening to destroy an idyll where time has stood still for half a millennium.”

A Gift With Broad Implications

Eli Broad’s $60 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art towards the construction of a new wing is being hailed as an unexpected windfall at a time when many museums are having to postpone or cancel expansion projects. But the gift’s impact may be more far-reaching than even Broad himself expected, says Christopher Reynolds: “Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA’s leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution.”

Is Britain’s New Labour Party Destroying The Arts?

“New Labour has wrecked culture in the sense of encouraging the lowest common denominator. It is total populism. That’s the reason why so many of us [in the arts] hate them – not just for our political differences.” So says playwright Tariq Ali, joining a chorus of cultural figures in the UK decrying the ruling party’s abandonment of high culture. Part of the anti-Labour venom is surely a result of Tony Blair’s unpopular support for the American war in Iraq, but the split runs deeper than a single issue. Where Labour was once thought to be the political ally of the serious art world, it seems increasingly clear to many artists that New Labour isn’t interested in anything but making the masses happy.

The Art Of The Virus

“Last December, Daccia Bloomstone, a 25-year-old Toronto artist, worked with a friend to set up up a commercial art gallery in downtown Toronto. They called it Virus Arts.” This, of course, was before the SARS epidemic hit, making the whole art-as-infectious-virus notion quite a bit scarier. Still, says Liam Lacey, it may be time to lay aside the old canard that human culture, and indeed humanity itself, is a virus upon the earth. “The life-threatening viruses that have hit this country recently, severe acute respiratory syndrome, mad cow and West Nile, with monkeypox threatening, are a reality check for the pervasiveness and elasticity of the extraordinary widespread viral analogy in popular culture.”

When Art And War Collide

The Dead Sea Scrolls go on display in Montreal this week, and if you think that’s not a big deal, you ought to have a word with the curator who had to get them there. From the Palestinian uprising in 2000, to the 9/11 attacks, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, global events have conspired to keep the scrolls out of Canada for years, and no one in Montreal dared believe that their exhibit would actually go off as scheduled until the scrolls physically arrived this month. The Montreal exhibit marks the first time that all three scrolls have been exhibited together outside of Israel.

Ideas Wanted

Toronto’s IdeaCity conference, which gets underway this weekend, is an intellectual celebration without direction, and that’s exactly how organizers want it. The hope is that, by bringing together some of Canada’s greatest thinkers for the mental equivalent of a jam session, great ideas will emerge, and walling in such broad-minded folks with a single ‘theme’ would seem to be antithetical to the effort. “But the event is still trying to find its feet conceptually. Some of the participants are genuinely ‘ideas’ people, but others are pop singers and wilderness adventurers.”

Fash Bash Crash

Fash Bash, the massive annual fundraising event staged by the Detroit Institute for the Arts, has been cancelled by the museum after a sponsor for the event could not be found. Fash Bash raised better than $500,000 for the DIA in 2001, but primary sponsor Marshall Field’s pulled its support after that year to focus on similar shows in Chicago and Minneapolis. Without a large corporation to pick up the tab, last year’s event actually ended up costing the DIA money, a disaster which the museum was determined not to repeat.

History For Hire?

“A scientist financed by, say, the tobacco industry, is expected to declare whose wallet is behind his research. But what about a historian? The question may seem odd, but it has suddenly become more urgent as medical historians are becoming witnesses in some of the country’s most important — and expensive — lawsuits. This practice is causing a fierce debate among historians over the ethics of testifying for industries accused of endangering the public’s health.”