How’s the Milwaukee Art Museum doing since opening its new Calatrava building last year? “Our annual expenses since the Calatrava addition opened have gone up by about $3 million – and so has income, by a like amount. Membership is up from 13,000 members before the expansion to 30,000 now; admissions are running at 360,000 visitors a year, or double levels before the expansion; annual donations and a successful museum store account for the rest.”
Tag: 08.02.03
American Culture – Winning Hearts And Minds?
America is going on a culture offensive in the “War on Terrorism.” Singer Toni Braxton is “in a new kind of army, standing at attention with Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, Ace of Base and the rapper Coolio, making up a Trojan-horse brigade drafted to seduce young Arab adults into admiring the United States. Their staging ground is Radio Sawa, a Washington-based Arabic-language radio network heard in most Middle Eastern countries. This is the funky side of America’s war on terror.”
Is Porn Mainstream?
“Not long ago, consumers of ‘smut,’ as it was derisively called, were considered to be, well, amoral sleazebags. The word ‘porno’ elicited seedy images of ‘peep shows’ and dilapidated video stores in beastly parts of town, where chain-smoking, raincoat-wearing deviants congregated behind papered-up windows amid the stench of vicarious stimulation. Today, right or wrong, ‘adult entertainment’ has lost most of this depraved veneer. Somehow the explicit has shed the illicit; the marginal has assumed the centre. The fornicating freaks are welcome on Main St. Call it ‘carnal chic.’ Or ‘gutter glam.’ Or, maybe, ‘pop porn’.”
San Jose Artists Decide To Stick With the Status Quo
In an effort to find new strategies for local arts funding, San Jose’s mayor recently proposed that the area’s arts groups opt to switch the source of their funding from a hotel-occupancy tax to the city’s general fund. But the deal didn’t look too good from the artists’ perspective, and the mayor’s proposal will likely be officially rejected this week. “Three coalitions of arts organizations and the San Jose Arts Commission unanimously agreed that such a change in funding would put their institutions in competition with critical city services for the same funds.”
California’s Other Movie City Loses Its Luster
San Francisco may well be the most photogenic city in America, and its seemingly endless supply of landmarks, ocean views, and stunning architecture once made it a favorite of Hollywood filmmakers. But the city’s film fortunes have fallen off considerably in recent years, and with California mired in a horrific budget crisis, local leaders are desperate to find a way to draw some of the Hollywood cash they used to depend on back to the Bay Area.
Turf War Raging At Houston Venue
Miller Outdoor Theater is “one of Houston’s most cherished cultural venues and home to dozens of free concerts and plays every year.” But a power struggle between the theater’s advisory board and the city’s parks department may be jeopardizing the venue’s legacy of providing Houstonians with free orchestra concerts, Shakespeare performances, and dance recitals. Miller board members set the theater’s schedule and pay the performers out of the money garnered from a local hotel tax. But the parks department staffs the theater, and its financial contribution is crucial. With money tight in Houston, the parks commissioner has slashed the Miller’s budget, and there is even talk of privatization, and that has board members up in arms.
TV Conquers The Universe
We’ve grown accustomed to seeing the flickering light of the television screen wherever we look, but the advertising industry just keeps finding new ways to force us to watch more of their brain-deadening dreck, says Frazier Moore. Whether it’s automated video screens in New York cabs, droning ads broadcast from above our heads at Wal-Mart, or the endless lineup of sports, weather, and news blaring at us from every neighborhood bar, the television offensive has become… well, offensive. “Who needs this video force-feeding! If cigarettes can be banned, why no regulation of TV in public places? Why, if not a total ban, at least a mandatory non-viewing section?”
Barenboim Leaps Into The Fray Again
Conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim has once again placed himself in the center of Mideast politics, playing a recital in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and criticizing the Israeli government’s policies towards the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. “Barenboim, 60, an Argentine-born Jew who grew up in Israel, has long campaigned for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, and has extolled music’s power to break down barriers. Since the early 1990s, he and Palestinian academic Edward Said have run a summer workshop for young musicians from Israel and Arab countries in places like Germany, the United States and Spain.”
Fool’s Gold
“A gold bar at the National Museum of American History, long thought to be a sample from the 19th century California Gold Rush, is a fake, according to a well-known geologist. Bob Evans, the scientist who examined the five-ounce bar, said the ingot is indeed gold but was not made in 1857, the date stamped on it. He said it was probably made in the 1950s and was purchased unknowingly by Josiah K. Lilly, the pharmaceutical industry executive who willed his enormous collection of gold coins to the Smithsonian in 1968… the museum will move the two bars into a section of the coin exhibit that deals with counterfeiting.”
The Model Of Orchestral Success
With dismal news floating out of orchestral offices across North America, aren’t there any major orchestras out there that can offer a proven strategy for the future? The answer, says William Littler, is yes, and one need look no further than the San Francisco Symphony. In the early 1990s, the orchestra found itself in an artistic rut, a fiscal mess, and a managerial malaise. Fifteen years later, the SFS is a model of both financial sanity and artistic integrity, and the ensemble is now regularly grouped together in print with the traditional “Big Five” orchestras. There were no miracles in San Francisco, just hard work by dedicated individuals in all parts of the organization, and there’s no reason why other orchestras can’t follow the same model.