Literary arts

In a past report on challenges facing San Francisco Bay Area arts nonprofits (Reader, Vol. 11, No. 2), I wrote at length about space. Many nonprofits had been forced to seek new office, rehearsal, and storage space due to a steep rise in Bay Area real estate costs fueled by demand from a dot-com economy for start-up locations. The situation seems to have eased somewhat, in part due to funder- and municipally-driven programs as well as to a general downturn in the economy.

We are at a new turning point in the field of aging. The past twenty-five years have witnessed two major conceptual shifts that have fundamentally influenced the course of research, practice, and policy deliberations.

We have transformed information into a form of garbage.
- Neil Postman

In Memory of Tom, My Brother

When we initiated an artist award program at The Durfee Foundation a few years ago, we decided to use financial need as one of several criteria for support. Durfee is a relatively small family foundation, and the trustees feel strongly that the foundation's modest resources should be applied where they will make the most difference. This is true across the board at the foundation, not only in the arts, but in our other programs as well.

I have been an artist and arts administrator for over thirty years. Now that I'm on the other side of what painter Chuck Close calls "temporarily abled," I find my own profession not very accommodating. Unexpectedly,five years ago I was partially paralyzed from complications of surgery.

Museums seem to be the most problematic. My gallery visits are based on stamina, not driven by content. Are comfortable benches so contrary to the enjoyment of art? Group tours leave me behind: I often catch up just as the docent is leading the group on to the next room.

June 2000, 89 pages, The Arts Marketing Center of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago.

2000, 218 pages; Northeastern University Press, (Boston, Massachusetts).

2000, 52 pages, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA).

Working paper writer, Mindy Levine; convening curator, Heather Hitchens

August 2000, 24 pages, Arts International.

1965, Partisan Review, also published in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York (1966), 304 pages.

In Susan Sontag's essay, "Styles," published by Partisan Review in 1965 and reprinted in Against Interpretation, a collection of her essays about art, she states: