Uh Oh. Two Thirds In UK Poll Think Arts Funding Should Be Cut
"Two-thirds of people agree with the government's stance on cutting arts funding and increasing reliance on private cash, a survey has suggested. And a fifth of the 2,022 British adults questioned said visual arts should not be given any government funding." - BBC 09/02/10

Downturn? Naw. Cal Performances Bulks Up With New Leader
Matias Tarnopolsky not only has managed to arrange significantly more performances than last year, but has also astounded with a host of artistic coups. - East Bay Express 09/01/10

BC Finds Extra $7M for Arts Funding
"After being in the hot seat for the past three weeks over cuts to cultural funding," provincial culture minister Kevin Krueger "announced Wednesday that the province would give the Arts Council $7 million [Cdn] from its 2010 Sports and Arts Legacy Fund." - CBC 09/01/10

Lincoln Center's New 'Electronic Infoscape'
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects of Lincoln Center's redevelopment project, see the LED and video displays they have placed about the campus "not just [as] finishing touches: they are an extension, and in many ways the ultimate expression, of a wholesale reimagining of the complex as more porous, inviting and immediate." - New York Times 09/02/10

Philly's Kimmel Center Also Tries Outdoor Video (And A Wolfgang Puck Eatery, Too)
The Kimmel plans to install a 7.5 x 7.5 x 7.5-foot, two-screen video cube at the building's most-trafficked corner. In addition, the center is bringing in Puck to create a restaurant in what is currently the ground-floor gift shop space. - Philadelphia Inquirer 09/01/10

Just How Do We Assert The Value Of Artists In Our Culture?
"Though government and academic aims are often different, their views toward the struggling artist are often the same, arrogant without knowing, and dismissive without cause." - CBC 09/01/10

Russian Readers Turn To Blogs For Their News (State Media Is Highly Censored) But...
"The FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, wants to force Internet service providers to remove undesirable websites. A law also requires these providers to install hardware at their own expense that allows the FSB -- with a judge's authorization -- to keep track of the websites people visit and the e-mails they write." - Der Spiegel 09/01/10

Tourist Traps, Er, Roadside Attractions No Longer Attract
"Mom-and-Pop roadside attractions are struggling for their meager share of the tourist dollar. They suffer from a weak economy, changes in travel habits and kids unlikely to be wowed by stationary dinos and miniature golf after watching Avatar in 3-D or slashing their siblings with Wii swords." - Wall Street Journal 08/30/10

Is The US Losing Its Global Edge In Higher Education?
"Tracking doctoral students by the beginning dates of their programs, the authors of one study in the book trace the startling increase in the share of Ph.D. candidates from abroad, from 29% for the cohort beginning study in 1980 to 49% in the 1996 cohort." - InsideHigherEd 08/31/10

Edinburgh Fringe Sells Record Box Office
"The three-week long arts festival sold 1,955,913 tickets, up more than 5% on last year. Festival organisers calculated that there were 40,254 performances of 2,453 shows in 259 venues across the city." - BBC 08/30/10

Has Teaching Of The Humanities Lost Its Way?
Camille Paglia: "The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s." - Chronicle of Higher Education 08/29/10

Bob Dylan Experiments with a Ticketless Show
For a performance last week in San Francisco, the folk-rock legend "asked his fans to line up outside the venue for a few hours with $60 cash in hand to get inside - eschewing extra fees, printer errors and scalper markups." How did it work? Only okay … - San Francisco Chronicle 08/26/10

Are The Olympics Profitable?
"Almost every city that does this gets into trouble one way or another because they can't figure out how to stop spending money. Athens thought they'd spend around $5 billion on the 2004 Games and ended up spending around $18 billion. London thought they were going to spend ($5 billion), and they're somewhere around $20 billion or more with two years to go." - Discovery 08/28/10

America's British Invasion, Part II
"In terms of media and entertainment, America hasn't felt this thoroughly permeated by products, characters, ideas and modes of behavior that originated across the Atlantic since the British Invasion of the 1960s. In short, we're witnessing a distinctly British moment in American culture." - Los Angeles Times 08/29/10

Japanese Cartoons Take On Repatriation Of Treasures In British Museum
"In Japan manga is a mainstream medium, with sales of magazines and books amounting to around $5 billion a year. They are increasingly popular abroad and starting to make their way into museum exhibitions--though in Japan itself they are still given short shrift as an art form." - The Economist 08/27/10

Crowdsourcing the Monitoring of Jordan's Antiquities
"Over the last four years the Getty Conservation Institute … has built an ambitious Web-based system that will allow archaeologists and conservators there, for the first time, to gain access to decades' worth of records about Jordan's sites and to monitor the condition of those sites much more easily." - New York Times 08/25/10

Are Cuts to UK Arts Spending a Good Idea? No! Yes!
Says one theatre director, "We exercise a social function with our art. But we also offer an excellent return on public funding." Says another, "The lion's share of Arts Council funding goes towards supporting organisations that it has always been supporting, and, as a result, the same things are done again and again." - The Guardian (UK) 08/25/10

Are the Arts a Living or a Hobby? Online Debate No. 4,653
The starting point: "When people observe that teachers have a lot of trouble making ends meet, it's a social justice problem. We don't consider 'teaching' a hobby … On the other hand, if we were to find out that futures traders have trouble making ends meet it would not be a social justice problem. They would just go do something else, and we'd probably be thrilled." - The Guardian (UK) 08/26/10

There's Always Been Product Placement in the Arts
Jennifer Edwards: "I hate to be a kill-joy, but the vast majority of classical art pieces were designed as product placement ads paid for by monarchs and religious institutions. The Sistine Chapel is an advertisement, just like Shakespearean plays and Swan Lake - all were bought and paid for by the wealthy for a purpose." - Huffington Post 08/26/10

A Creative Map Of Toronto
"While the service class makes up the largest share of jobs in Toronto, creative class workplaces have significantly better access to the city's fastest transit infrastructure." - Prosperity Institute 08/26/10