jaccessl Local Government and the Arts 1979 271 pp., $15.00 from: ' ' American Council on the Arts 570 Seventh Ave. New York, NY 10018 This amazing book covers "The Arts and" everything from economic development and urban design to transportation and public safety. The appendix is the most valuable and useful appendix I have ever seen in a resource book for the arts activist. There are copies of R~solu_tions and Ordinances used by the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to , endorse the arts as an essential element in the quality of city life. There are organization charts that show how arts commissions have been integrated in the staff structure of several cities. Job descriptions of Arts Commission directors, ordinances authorizing percentages of the General Fund for Arts support, and even fund~ng guidelines and application forms for city arts grants and street artists make this book a must. Local Government and the Arts should sit on the desk of every elected official in your county. Few handbooks would prove .to be more informative.-Jim Williams The Social Life of St:_nall Urban Spaces, by William H. Whyte, 1980, 125 pp., $9.50 (paperback) from: The CQn:servation Foundation 1717 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington, DC 20036 My favorite sequence in this fascinating book is of a woman walking up to a chair in a city plaza and moving it a foot before sitL ting down-neither into the sun nor out of it. As the author observes, "even when there is no-functional reason for it, the exercise of choice is satisfying." As director of NYC's Street Life Project, •Whyte has ·spent the last ten years taking time-lapse photographs in urban spaces, discovering which ones pebple use or don't use, and why. Among our best urban resources, he says, are the small spacesplazas, miniparks, sidewalk ledges-where people pause to talk, rest, eat, soak up some rays, or just people-watch. Successful urban space (that is, space that people use) requires sun, trees, water, food, a wholesome relationship with the street and, especially, good seating. The deliberate movement_in many cities away from street life and small public places to the dead spaces of faceless fortress-like me:.. gastructures should not become our future or:ientation. ~hyte's book is a ma_nual for Rlanners, arch1t~cts, dev1elopers, s:ity officials, urban co_nservationists, artd anyone else concerned with the future of our cities, complete with practical lessons for designing. new spaces and resurrecting dead ones. The appendix provides guidelines for using time-lapse photography, and in addition includes a digest of New York City's openspace zoning provisions. - MR • May 1980 RAIN Page 19 The,Arts in the Economic Li/e of the City, 1979, 150 pp., from: • American Council on-the Arts 570 Seventh Ave. New York, NY 10018 This study, based on the experiences of cultural development in Los Angeles, is composed of three major components: 1) development ~fa model to inventory and analyze arts activities and institutions in • developing strategies to enhance the contri- ·bution of the arts to local economies; 2) an overview of the arts in Los Angeles; and 3) a probe of ways to improve organizing and financing the arts "system" to strengthen its economic contribution. Of greatest interest to me was the final chapter, "Strategies for Change," which dealt with timely subjects including marketing factors to encourage arts expansion, federal arts programs, strengthening, neighborhood arts and, perhaps the most valuable section in the entire study, organizing to strengthen the economic role of the arts. Reading this. study enhanced my understanding of the arts as an essential element of a city, and gave me some valuabl~ glimpses of what my home town, , Eugene, could grow to if given the opportunity. -Jim Williams 1. The EstheticAnimal, by Robert Joyce, '1975, 130 pp., $7.50 from: Exposition Press Hicksville, NY 11802 This·little-known book is a brilliant study of the role of the arts as a cultural and political force in Western history. Tackling headlong the notion that technique and rational thought have been the cornerstones of human social and cultural evolution, Joyce instead argues that the survival of the planet and the vitality of the human species requires an all-consuming cultural transformation. • The esthetic revolution will be a subjective revolution in direct contradiction to the objective te~hnological revolution, which ended in industrialization. The arts will not be an esthetic means to a nones- .thetic ~nd, as they were for the bourgeoisie. In ereatin~ and re-creating qrts to bring about a revolutionary subjective-social change, the art-means themselves become inseparable from the ends sought as they are absorbed.in a changing audience . Such arts will constitute the revolutionized social e·nvironment in which . . . a consciously esthetic creature will appear . .. . The artists as revolutio·naries and the ~evolutionary artists will go to the people with'the art works that will transform,the people's minds. They. will not try to beautify and so perpetuate the slums. They will not coo•! the ghettoes esthetically. They will not make misery tolerable in the tenements and so postpone the advent of the new society. -MR
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