Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang.

g. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Supplementary Ref

003

Cities and Art

Anthropological evidence indicates that artistic expression and recreational-leisure activities are found in all societies. In large urbanized areas there are tasks, publics, and means for many art forms including dance, film, music, opera, painting, sculpture, theatre, and writing. For each of these art expressions, there is an accompanying need for physical space designed as auditoriums, conservatories, libraries, movie houses, museums, performance halls, schools, and so forth. In urban areas, there are street arts, supergraphics on buildings, as well as paintings, sculpture, and chamber music in residences. Buildings like hotels, banks, shopping centers, and schools are places where various forms of art are from time to time exhibited and performed. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City is about one of many examples of a sociophysical environment for the arts at the apex. Lincoln center was designed with sufficient physical space to provide for audiences totaling 3,200,000 persons a year, plus additional millions through radio and television. The Lincoln center buildings were planned and designed by internationally famous architects. In themselves the buildings are works of arta type of the city-management. They articulate together to make the total site a place of beauty for intensive cultural life. Art museums have become major components of cities in the last one hundred and fifty years. Museums are used by children and adults of all ages. Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection. Paintings are the most commonly displayed art objects; however, sculpture, decorative arts, furniture, textiles, costume, drawings, pastels,

watercolors, collages, prints, artists' books, photographs, and installation art are also regularly shown. Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as performance art, music concerts, or poetry readings. Beauty in cities is found from their origin to the present. Planning which is specifically intended to beautify the city as a whole, however, is essentially a nineteenthand twentieth-century phenomenon. The desire to develop more open green space in cities was a response to two motives, namely to improve the social welfare of people in densely populated centers, and to improve the urban aesthetics. The aesthetic motive is clearly seen in what has become known as the city-beautiful movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new commercial culture centered around leisure and entertainment established itself in urban areas. Its growth can be explained by a number of factors: more leisure time for workers; rising incomes; an expanding white-collar sector which included a considerable percentage of women; advances in technology, notably the electrification of street lights, trolley lines and advertising billboards; the growth of banks and financial institutions and emergence of new sources of capital. The latest capitalism results in the serial reproduction of malls, pedestrian city centers, plazas, and waterfronts as capital markets reinvest and restructure, moving away from industrial production and shifting into the service sectors, financial services, marketing and retailing. Global firms in retailing, tourism, hotel accommodation and fast-food outlets have invested in urban prime sites with the result that the mix of shopping

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

and leisure experiences varies little from one city to another. Particular distinctive places disappear only to be replaced by universal homogenous non places. Everywhere is nowhere; all places are pretty much the same. Globalization gradually erases distinctive localities and local identities. Many governments worldwide with planning powers and budges reconstruct and redevelop the old city into modern metropolis. The concentration on culture has produced a greater investment in citys cultural buildings. Culture is no longer regarded as the super-structural outgrowth of a buoyant economic base but an economic resource in itself that can help drive economic growth. Despite the problems of define culture, it is argued that culture can create jobs and generate income; culture can put a city on the tourist map. Cities draw recorded history, festivals, fairs, plays, masques, and tournaments to enhance the staging of cultural attractions. The rapid growth of what is now termed as cultural sector has been accompanied by a

marked increase in the number of music and arts festivals vying for audiences. Strobe lights, laser show, giant inflatable, video displays, the building of huge walls across the stage, three dimensional banners, fireworks and other pyrotechnics are used to enhance the audiences appreciation of the cultural show. There has been an enormous proliferation of museum, arts and theatre complexes, with new ones created and old ones expanded and restyled architecturally to add visual excitement. Spectacular sports complexes are often created on the back of attracting so-called mega-events, like the Olympics or footballs World Cup. These events are also widely believed to be golden opportunities for ambitious city authorities to initiate far-reaching regeneration plans. It may be an exaggeration to say that promotion of culture has become the preferred route for regenerating ailing economies, but its importance cannot be minimized. Not surprisingly, the large festivals for which cities compete are now the targets of intense, sustained, expensive and, sometimes bitter campaigns.