In the latest edition of her Voice of Scottsdale email, Virginia Korte parrots many of the themes of Becky Bartkowski’s New Times article last week about the Scottsdale Cultural Council. I wrote about my take on it, too.
Korte sums up with:
Becky Bartkowski’s assessment of our city’s arts community was tough to take – especially because the truth hurts.
Strange that Korte’s jumping on the Cultural Council-bashing bandwagon, given how she’s cozied up to former Cultural Council board chair (and colleague on the City Council) Linda Milhaven. You may recall that it was Milhaven who hired walking disaster Bill Banchs as Cultural Council CEO, who then promptly flushed whatever organizational camaraderie the Cultural Council had, down their award-winning bathroom toilets.
Korte closes her column with her “Bite Me” snippet, this time quoting former New Times art critic Kathleen Vanesian:
“It’s not like running a museum [like Scottsdale’s Cultural Council-managed Museum of Contemporary Art, aka SMoCA] as if you were running Exxon. Sorry, it’s a little more complicated. You have to have an aesthetic, an art history background and your ear to the ground.”
Korte would have been more true to the point of the article if she’d quoted Vanesian’s previous comment:
“[The Cultural Council is] focused on buildings and offices and who reports to whom rather than any emphasis on what’s being brought or accomplished…”
And that lack of focus on the product is what you get with a no-bid, 20-year contract, containing no objective deliverables, AND an annual $4 million taxpayer-funded cash subsidy…courtesy of Virginia Korte and her colleagues on the Scottsdale City Council.