|
| |
|
|
YOU GOTTA HAVE ART
More momentum for arts and culture on Beacon Hill
BY ADAM REILLY
|
|
|
|
|
If you’re a supporter of the arts, mark your calendar. On Wednesday, October 19, the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Tourism, Arts, and Cultural Development comes to Boston’s Old South Meeting House for a 9:30 am forum on strengthening Massachusetts’s arts, culture, and tourism industries. It’ll be the third such meeting in just over a month — the first two took place in Salem and Stockbridge — and subsequent sessions are slated for Plymouth and Provincetown later this fall. This ongoing listening tour is yet another sign of the legislature’s increasing commitment to treating arts and culture as economic engines. The joint committee itself was born in a reorganization that Sal DiMasi, the House Speaker, and Robert Travaglini, the Senate president, presided over earlier this year. In the budget for the current fiscal year, meanwhile, the Massachusetts Cultural Council — which promotes arts and culture as agents of economic growth — saw its funding pushed to $9.6 million, up more than $2 million from two years ago. We should know in the next few weeks whether the Cultural Facilities Fund — a key piece of the House’s proposed economic-stimulus package that could generate $500 million in cultural-facilities investment over the next decade — will get a sympathetic hearing in the Senate, which is expected to begin hammering out its own economic-stimulus package any day now (See "Editorial," News and Features, August 5.). But supporters of the House proposal seem guardedly optimistic that the Senate, too, will treat cultural-facilities funding as a priority. If so, arts advocates will soon have another victory to cheer. And this would be their biggest win yet.
|
