Here are five articles from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time:
NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman Announces New Research on the Value Added By Cultural Industries
Arts.gov: There are 2.1 million artists in the United States workforce, and a large portion of them -- designers -- contribute to industries whose products Americans use every day, according to new research from the National Endowment for the Arts. Artists and Arts Workers in the United States offers the first combined analysis of artists and industries, state and metro employment rates, and new demographic information such as age, education levels, income, ethnicity, and other social characteristics.
Stephen Sondheim Chicago Tribune interview with Chris Jones
chicagotribune.com: At the top of "Look, I Made a Hat," the second half of his exhaustively detailed two-volume set of collected lyrics to such incomparable musicals as "Gypsy" and "Follies," Stephen Sondheim addresses some of the complaints about the first book, "Finishing the Hat." "The most common of them," he writes, "is that I didn't speak enough about my personal life, 'personal' being the euphemism for 'intimate,' which is the euphemism for 'sexual.'"After saying that he had been as personal as he could be about his creative life — a creative life that, among many other highlights, included early tutoring from surrogate father Oscar Hammerstein II and collaborations with such giants as Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Ethel Merman, James Lapine, Bernadette Peters, et cetera — Sondheim writes that these volumes are collections of lyrics, plus interpolations, not a memoir. "Look, I Made a Hat" deals principally with his work after 1981 and will be published by Knopf on Nov. 22. "If I'd wanted to write a memoir," he writes, "I would have, but I don't, and I didn't."
Artists, Institutions, and the Decline of Public Discourse
HowlRound: My two disturbing moments taken together, in what I will admit is a bleak interpretation, amounted to something like: arts administrators don’t want to be bothered talking about how artists feel disenfranchised anymore because they find the conversation both insulting and passé, and artists don’t believe what arts administrators have to say so why should an arts administrator bother to engage in the first place. All I can think is we’re mimicking congressional politics. We’re all happily ensconced in our immovable worldviews and we’re willing to manipulate whatever the other side says to prop up our own vantage point. This form of public discourse is straight out of certain disreputable news rooms most of us complain about. Our own discourse is no more fact-based, careful, or informed.As artists and institutions, we are actively participating in the decline of public discourse taking over our nation. And frankly, I think we should stop it.
Walk
2AMt: Over the past 48 hours, the culture pages in England have been filled with reports which are all variants of the same story: “Walkouts abound at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Marat/Sade.” I first spotted this on Sunday in The Daily Mail and since then, the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph, among many others, have all piled on. Marat/Sade, while an acknowledged modern classic, is a challenging work with content that surely doesn’t appeal to all audiences. So it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a play about the Marquis de Sade might provoke squirming and even early exits; I suspect that Doug Wright’s Quills, also about de Sade’s incarceration at Charenton, sent some people fleeing from assorted theatres as well. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if artists involved in various productions of both of these plays see the odd hasty retreat as a sign that they’re succeeding, a badge of honor.
Critical Juncture
Theatre Communications Group - American Theatre – September 2011: Whenever I told friends that I was writing about 12 of the most influential theatre critics in America, I made sure to pause for the laugh. Are there a dozen out there? In this atomized age of Twitter and Facebook, with media outlets shedding arts staffers and shredding budgets, what constitutes influence? How was this list compiled? Not scientifically, to be sure. But these 12 journalists made the cut for specific reasons: years on the beat, quality of writing, reach of their voice through syndication, and, lastly, understanding of the field. Another criterion is quite blunt: Many of them are "last man or woman standing" in their communities; after they retire or take a buyout, it's unclear if some blogger or junior critic will step up to fill the void. As such, they form a vital phalanx of critical opinion that chronicles and weighs work that national media outlets are content to ignore. These dozen writers may not be flashy prose stylists or even revolutionary thinkers about their art form. But they have dedicated years to the field—and certainly not to get rich.
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