Trib Checks Its Art Beat
On September 1 entertainment editor Richard Christiansen, who’s 59, joins the company. Chicago’s most prominent arts critic, Christiansen presides over all the Tribune’s critics and entertainment writers and the Sunday Arts section. While administrating, he has continued to write: he’s still the Tribune’s principal theater critic, and he also reviews dance.
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“I have for quite some time been interested in having Dick Christiansen do that work for us. . . . I want him to reduce the amount of theater criticism he does and eliminate the amount of administrative work he does, in order to do a different kind of writing about the arts that I’ve desperately wanted for the Tribune.”
Was Fuller reacting to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s recent survey of the arts in Chicago? As a couple of Reader drama critics reminded us, the MacArthur report came down hard on local media. “Participants repeatedly stated that there were not an acceptable number of well-informed critics for a city the size of Chicago,” said the survey released last March, “and that the media did not allocate enough space or time for serious criticism to be heard.”
“Wouldn’t you know that this year we picked the quintessential New York dramatist, Neil Simon!” he said. “I was pushing very hard for Marvin’s Room by Scott McPherson, which was done at the Goodman Theatre Studio.”
In other words, it’s a cold-war term tinged with the notion of “commie lies.”
The 1988 School Reform Act was written to change that. A key provision required the annual Chapter I allocation to be redirected–in a five-year, step-by-step process–to the individual schools. Each school’s share would be prorated according to the number of poor students enrolled there, and the money would be controlled by the school’s newly created Local School Council.
