Help The Arts Fuse Take Flight — On the Top of Taxi Cabs
By Bill Marx.
With the sudden and sad end of The Boston Phoenix, one of the few places for serious coverage of the arts in the city—news, reviews, and features—has vanished from Boston’s media landscape. The number of professional outlets featuring writing about arts and culture is shrinking. It is an alarming loss, a disgrace for a city of Boston’s size and reputation, and the problem regrettably tends to be ignored, by arts institutions as well as by arts lovers. Yes, there are a number of blogs popping up to try to take the place of the Boston Phoenix and others. But quantity is not quality.
In truth, intelligent talk about the culture plays a crucial role in an area’s cultural ecology, not only in terms of getting the word out about what or who is playing where but in articulating the vital meaning of the arts and humanities in our lives. Without substantial evaluation and dialogue, the arts have no public resonance, no compelling social or spiritual significance. They simply become another part of the urban economic mix, a matter of how many tickets or copies are sold. The disappearance of independent and serious reflection marginalizes the arts, which diminishes the power of the imagination.
The Arts Fuse was established more than five years ago to be an online resource for expert writing—critical, informative, provocative—on the arts in Boston and the rest of New England. More than 1500 articles—all currently online—have been published on The Arts Fuse, and we now have over 60 writers and counting. We want to get the word out about their good work, to make people aware of a magazine that takes the arts seriously, though never solemnly.
With your help, The Arts Fuse will launch its first-ever advertising campaign atop taxi cabs this spring. We want to encourage Greater Boston’s arts and cultural communities to see artsfuse.org as an indispensable resource. When you see the taxis, you’ll know YOU are a part of our success!
Here is the page where you can make your tax deductible contribution. The Arts Fuse is a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
Thanks.