| December 2005
Arts Management | Cultural
Preservation | Film & Television |
History | Performing
Arts | Visual Arts |
Arts Management
G1 - The Diversity of Cultural Participation
Ostrower, Francie
Urban Institute, November 2005, 48p
This report presents findings from a national survey of cultural
participation, this study concludes that arts research, policy,
and management need to be reoriented to pay greater attention
to the diversity of cultural participation. It notes that people
attend different types of cultural events for different reasons,
with different people, in different places and with different
experiences. Fulltext
Cultural Preservation
G2 - A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage Health Index
Report on the State of America's Collections
Heritage Preservation and the Institute of Museum and Library
Services
Released December 6, 2005
Based on a survey of archives, historical societies, libraries,
museums, and scientific research organizations, large and small,
from every U.S. state and territory, this report concludes that
"immediate action is needed to prevent the loss of millions
of irreplaceable artifacts" in libraries and museums. Areas
of concern include permanent damage to items, lack of emergency
planning, and conservation staffing. It also includes links to
related information. Fulltext
Film & Television
G3 - The New Hollywood, Money, Politics, and Art
Epstein, Edward Jay
American Enterprise Institute, Bradley Lecture Series, December
9, 2005. Online
To survive, Hollywood has had to reinvent itself several times.
He maintains, that, today, although Hollywood totally dominates
the world's entertainment industry and have created a celebrity
culture that the media feeds off of and obsesses over, Hollywood
is not about movies. It is about creating properties--including
TV programs, cartoons, videos, and games--that can be sold in
a multitude of markets that go well beyond the movie theaters.
The six major Hollywood studios (Warner Bros., Fox, Paramount,
Sony, Disney, and Universal) get an internal rate of return on
their capital of between 15 and 25 percent, a rate that many great
industrial companies can only envy. Edward Jay Epstein writes
"The Hollywood Economist" column for Slate magazine.
Fulltext
G4 - Michael Moore: Cinematic Historian or Propagandist?
A Historians Film Committee Panel Presented at the 2005 American
Historical Association Meeting
O'Connor, John E. et al.
Film & History, Summer 2005, v35, #2, pp7-16
At the American Historical Association meeting in Seattle in January
2005, the Historians Film Committee presented a panel on a film
which has recently produced its share of controversy. Four historians
discussed their views of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Their
comments illuminate and focus what has become an interesting debate
among scholars who saw the film become an issue in the 2004 presidential
election and provide an interesting reminder of the original definition
of documentary film proposed in the 1930s as productions that
would move audiences to social or political action.
Fulltext
G5 - Wounded Knee Massacre
Phillip, Charles
American History, December 2005, v40, #5, p16-, 4p
"The intermittent war between the United States and the Plains
Indians that stretched across some three decades after the Civil
War came to an end on December 29, 1890, at the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota. The events leading up to its final act--the Wounded
Knee Massacre -- had been building since the late 1880s, when
the son of a Paiute shaman named Wovoka had first introduced a
series of new beliefs and practices to the Indian reservations
of the West… U.S. Indian authorities claimed that in the hands
of the defeated and embittered leaders of the Teton Sioux -- men
like Short Bull, Kicking Bear and eventually Sitting Bull himself
-- Wovoka's peaceful religion had taken on the militant overtones
of a millennial uprising. Wovoka had created a ceremony called
the Ghost Dance to invoke the spirits of the dead and facilitate
their resurrection." It became clear that what the Ghost
Dance foretold was a hope forlorn. Charles Phillips is the
author and co-author of numerous works of history and biography.
Fulltext
Performing Arts
G7 - A Century on Stage
Wilson, August,
American Theatre, November 2005, v22, #9, pp26-32
"Wilson discusses the tributary streams of culture, history
and experience that have provided him with the materials out of
which he makes his art. He wanted to present the unique particulars
of black American culture as the transformation of impulse and
sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural
rituals that defined and celebrated black people as men and women
of high purpose." Fulltext
Visual Arts
G8 - Grant Wood's Family Album
Taylor, Sue
American Art, Summer 2005, v19, #2, pp49-66
Iowan artist Grant Wood is best known for his painting American
Gothic, depicting a man with a pitchfork standing next to a younger
woman. The woman was his beloved sister, Nan Wood Graham, and
the man, Byron McKeeby, was his dentist. The article provides
an overview of Wood's works and his life story, dealing mainly
with his childhood. The author sees the woman in his most famous
painting as a stand-in for his mother, Hattie, and the man as
a stand-in for his father, Francis Maryville Wood, who died when
the artist-to-be was 10. The author believes that "although
not portrait likenesses, the immediately familiar Midwestern figures
are parental images; as such, they evoke universal, even primal
responses, typically covered over by the spirited humor of the
picture's myriad, mocking iterations". Fulltext
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