Star Trek News II

Reasons why George Takei is a hero:

1. This.
2. This.
3. This.

So to recap: when George Takei was a child, our government put him into a prison because of the way he looked. Then he became part of a TV series imagining a world where humanity had become equal, pushed to improve his local community by serving on its city council and designing its transportation infrastructure, and pushing quietly and with dignity for the equality of his own communities.

Oh, and he helps run one of the finer theaters in Los Angeles.

Local Arts News

I've given plenty of shout-outs to Createquity as being a fine blog (and not just because I've contributed to it), and one of the top reasons is its excellent coverage of local arts issues. But of course, the best reporters of local news are people who are local. Luckily, there's now a way to bring those two forces together -- Createquity tipster! If you spot an important local arts news story (like this one), you can toss them along to him, and it'll probably wind up in one of his excellent Around the Horn segments. I still like my method, but let's all be sure to give those local arts stories the attention they deserve.

Hurrah crowdsourcing!

Ian Moss Bait

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez for NPR's local affiliate 89.3 reported:

Almost half the department’s full-time positions — 33 out of 70 — will be gone through layoffs, early retirement, or unfilled vacancies, Garay said. Fifteen people who work for Cultural Affairs will lose their jobs - some in two weeks, others in July.

(...)

The layoffs, Garay said, are part of budget cuts that include transferring the administration of city-owned theaters and art centers to other organizations. Under the plan, outside groups would assume control of the Madrid Theater in Canoga Park, the Vision Theater in Leimert Park, the Warner Theater in San Pedro, and the Watts Towers Art Center. The city will issue requests for proposals.

Last month, supporters of the cultural affairs department jammed an L.A. City Council meeting to oppose a proposal that would gut the department’s $10 million budget. Council members shelved the plan.

I don't know what the impact of the city getting rid of the arts buildings, but it was gratifying to see that there are a lot of "supporters of the cultural affairs department" (don't they just mean "supporters of the arts"?) in Los Angeles.

Arts and Government I: From the Duh Department

David Byrne has a basically spot-on blog-post about a $14,000,000 bailout for opera in Los Angeles, which I got from a post by Scott Walters, who manages to avoid the reflex to defend the arts organization involved. I understand the emotional draw -- one of my first responses was, "shit, this is basically an argument against the field of Opera, which we all know couldn't survive a day without state support.

For me, Byrne's argument all boils down to:

Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places.

In a perfect world, where we weren't choosing between opera and children's education, I would passionately defend Opera's right to state funding. But Byrne is right: the county doesn't have the money to support the students it has. How can it ethically put a big whopping $14,000,000 into one opera?

There's also another argument that's implicit in Byrne's post that I want to highlight because I don't think he does it quite strongly enough. Talking about the Bilbao museum:

The show that’s up there now is a Frank Lloyd Wright survey (previously exhibited in NY’s Guggenheim), and a permanent collection hodgepodge — not exactly reasons to make a special trip.

And then a few sentences later:

Funding future creativity is a real investment — there’s a chance these kids will build, write, draw or play something that will fill theaters, clubs, stadiums, web pages, whatever. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.

If we don't invest in creating a generation of young artists, museums, opera houses, theaters are going to get trapped in time. Slowly, a vaccuum will be created--I say slowly because there are a few MFA programs in this country that will produce people to fill it, but it won't be convincing. Like the Bilbao, there isn't going to be that compelling, new work to really draw people to the venue.

And also, when Byrne says:

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.

He doesn't say that part of that greater value is that studies show that the best way to create audiences for the arts is to have children participate. A staggering majority of our arts audience today is people who participated in the arts when they were young. If less and less children get that opportunity, then--well, let's just say that however bad our decline is now, it could get even worse.

A Sense Of Place

The Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities report that <100k led me to has a number of interesting assertions.

One of the ones that was more surprising to me, inasmuch as I hadn't thought of it, is the necessity of a "sense of place" to a community.

In part, this is because my personal experience left me a little bereft of that as I was growing up. At the age of three months I emigrated from Israel to the United States, and although I can't profess that I felt alienated from America, there also was at least a certain sense of not-belonging, of aloofness from the environment.

The point of my arrival was not helpful to this. I arrived in the middle of Southern California's suburbian wasteland. The community my family lives in now, Irvine, has no "sense of place." There is no center to the city; it has no downtown. It is a chain of disconnected housing developments. It is the epitome of car culture. Most of the city was developed thirty years ago, and there is a complete and utter absence of history.

As a result, people come and settle in Irvine, and their children leave. There are very few families who are ingrained in the community; most are only staying for a while, taking advantage of good jobs and good education.

Nearby, there is a very different small town. Its an arts community named Laguna Beach (all of you reality TV folks know this town). It was founded in the 1930s by a colony of landscape painters. And in the 1960s it became the local hippy hub. Why did it become a hippy hub? Well, because of the artists who were already living there.

The people who live in Laguna Beach tend to be more invested in the arts. There are a lot more galleries, theaters, and amateur programs like amateur theater and an amateur choir.

Why is Laguna Beach so different from Irvine? Well, Thriving Arts: Thriving Small Communities points its fingers toward a number of things I can point to in Laguna Beach (one of the other ones is the fact that Laguna Beach, trapped amongst a series of bluffs, is forced to be built around a central main street right on the beach; another is the fact that the beach itself is an "environmental draw for tourism"). But I think that the original founding in the 1930s created a sense of place for the town--after all, it was landscape painters, and if landscape painters would like to be credited with creating anything, it's a sense of place.

Why is a sense of place important, though? How does it link up?

Last fall I went to the Czech Republic, which is a place that has a sense of PLACE. In fact, the history and the culture has become a generalized excuse for everything, and created an incredibly anti-cultural immobility, but that's a story for another day. While I was there, I had an excellent professor, Jan Urban. Jan Urban was the head of the Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution, working closely with Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus, the first two Presidents of the Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic.

For Jan Urban, all of the big problems came from a sense of identity. He looked at Nationalism as an extension of a search for identity in 1800s Europe, Nationality being identity based on language spoken. For him, a hugely influential piece of reading is Robert J. Lifton's Thought Reform, which broke down Chinese Re-education methods into a 12 step plan, mostly around the idea of breaking down a subject's sense of identity and rebuilding it along the lines you wish.

He applied those principles when he was in Mozambique, attempting to deprogram child-soldiers from their civil war. His method there was to use soccer to reform their militaristic identity, using the parts of their identity that are already beneficial (team mentality, competitive nature) and stripping away the parts of their identity that don't work in society (mindlessness and violence). We also applied those principles to come up with a way of tackling the PTSD and economic isolation of returning veterans.

If Jan Urban's hypothesis is true (which I strongly believe it is), and a sense of identity is at the center of how we interact with ourselves and our society, than building a sense of place is a large chunk of a sense of identity. And according the report, building that sense of identity is central to building a value of the arts.

This means that at the core of shifting values is shifting the sense of place. Los Angeles, for instance, is a place that is plagued with an extreme lack of a sense of place, and the solution to tackle that was a downtown redesign--which so far has not had any effect on the sense of place of the residents (probably because downtown is not where they live).

If that's the case, then in the next few weeks I intend to examine how the 12-Steps could be used to influence the sense of place of a community.

VARA Case

VARA is an odd intellectual property law that I only recently came to find out about. It applies to visual art only (hence my only recent discovery of it), and it is the only law in American intellectual property that asserts so-called "moral rights".

Via the Art Law Blog, a case out of Los Angeles about the rights of the mural painter to guarantee that the city will not simply paint over his mural if it becomes vandalized. The quote from the Contra Coast Times:

"According to the complaint, Frank Romero's automobile-themed 'Going to the Olympics,' a mural which had adorned the Alameda Street underpass of the Hollywood (101) Freeway since 1984, was destroyed by [the California Department of Transportation] in June 2007. ... When the agency found that Romero's 2,040-square-foot mural had been vandalized by graffiti, Caltrans workers 'simply obliterated the mural by painting over it,' said Timothy B. Sottile, Romero's attorney."

The Art Law Blog post also notes the precedent to this going back to 1991, which was A) not long after VARA's passage (1990) and B) about the time of the Los Angeles Riots, and in general a period of instability in the city of Los Angeles.

I don't have anything particularly cogent to say, except that this is the sort of awkwardness that "moral rights" presents; on the one hand, emotionally, I believe that the mural has a right to be protected. On the other hand, from a legal standpoint, the city commissioned the artwork, and they have the right to be boorish art-haters if they want to. As someone who has been recently on the side of users in defense of original creators of late, I feel like I should be championing the latter, but really I lean more towards the former.

But I've read other cases (can't think of any right now) that made VARA seem more abusive, and I have not been in favor of "moral rights" in IP Law at all. I don't know. I'm conflicted