Margot Fonteyn loved to dance, and she was perfectly fashioned by nature and temperament for the physical rigors, fiendish politics and unforgiving geometry of ballet.
Tag: 12.01.04
When Historians Copy The Past
In the past few years there have been several high-profile cases of historians plagiarizing. “Their cheating ways go right to the ailing heart of the history profession, which, to its detriment, has dropped the ball on governance. There’s something very wrong in the house of history when the right-wing Weekly Standard passes as the profession’s whistleblower and chortles over careless mistakes by liberal historians.”
New Russians And The Russians
This week in London, the largest sales of Russian paintings were up for bid. And who’s buying? Russians. “So-called ‘New Russians’ have accumulated vast fortunes, helped by rising prices for oil and other raw materials, and have spent some of that wealth on buying works by artists they were taught in school to revere.”
Why Is Tavis Quitting NPR?
Why is Tavis Smiley quitting his NPR show? He says that his audience on NPR is not high enough and that NPR needs to do more to reach out to minority audiences. “The show, carried by 87 public stations nationwide, was created by NPR with the African-American Public Radio Consortium, in response to a campaign by public radio stations at historically black colleges for more programs aimed at minority audiences. Mr. Smiley’s show reached just under 900,000 listeners a week, according to NPR, many of them young and African-American.” But the show has built audience steadily, beginning with an audience of only 300,000 two years ago.
Arkansas – Where Arts Education Matters
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has made arts education a priority of his administration: “It’s a critical part of the education of any child. A part of what I feel like I have to do is help superintendents, school chiefs and other governors realize that they’ll be leaving a lot of children behind if they don’t put a focus on arts education.”
Arts Funding, Jersey Style (It Helps To Have Connections)
Three New Jersey arts groups split $1.2 million from special allocations determined by members of the state legislature. The grants did not go through the traditional arts funding process. “The politicians conferred with members of the Treasury’s Division of Administration to decide the grants. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the state agency that already distributed $22.7 million to arts organizations this year, was not consulted.”
Congress Rebuffs Bush Effort To Boost NEA Funding
A new appropriations bill is set to be approved by the U.S. Congress without an $18 million special allotment to the National Endowment for the Arts that President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush had specifically lobbied for. “‘American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius,’ was meant to be a chance to reacquaint people with the best of American dance, theater, jazz, classical music, literature and other arts, extending the NEA’s reach into communities all over the country, giving members of Congress bragging rights about how they were bringing home artistic pork and insulating the agency from political critics.” But Congress has allotted only $2 million for the project, which will have to be scaled back considerably.
Another Surplus In SF, But Red Ink In Sight
“The San Francisco Symphony finished its 2003-04 fiscal year with an unexpected $700,000 surplus on an operating budget of just over $50 million, according to a report presented at Monday’s annual board meeting. The black ink was the result of some timely cost-cutting combined with stronger-than- anticipated ticket sales… But management isn’t expecting the good times to last: The budget for the current year includes a planned deficit of more than $2 million.”
Intermissions Are Just Better In Pittsburgh
A New York Times critic recently penned an article extolling the virtues of the intermission-less one-act play, concluding that one-acts offer a “purer” theatrical experience. Christopher Rawson doesn’t dislike one-act plays, but doesn’t agree that they are necessarily superior to more traditional two- and three-act fare. “What’s pure about theater? That’s like insisting all churches be white. The proof is really in the individual pudding. And although I understand [the critic’s] irritation at New York intermissions, where theaters are crowded with strangers, a Pittsburgh intermission still has social pleasures that need not conflict with the play.”
The Hidden Cost of High Admission
With MoMA now charging $20 just for the privilege of getting in the door, other museums are sure to follow with higher admission charges of their own. But such hikes are not only inconvenient, says Jeff Weinstein, they threaten to undermine the very mission of art museums. “Without dependable government grants, museums think they must be run like Wal-Marts in order to survive,” but by setting their price scale according to what the high rollers will pay, museums run the risk that no penniless youth will ever set foot inside. And assuming that today’s penniless youths are tomorrow’s millionaire entrepreneurs, as some of them certainly are, MoMA is risking the interest of an entire generation for short-term profit.