Looking back on 2023, Gary Raymond examines the cultural landscape in Wales amid an ongoing battle between its Arts Council and National Theatre, and funding cuts.
Over a period of fifty-odd years, Gore Vidal wrote an end of year reflective essay he called his “State of the Union”. It was partly an alternative take on the annual Presidential address to the American citizenry, and partly, as he explained in his 1975 iteration, a bringing together of all the conversations that he had been having that year “across the republic”.
No doubt Vidal would have found little to titillate his competing appetites for grandeur and gossip in the goings on in Wales, and he may have even found irony in the appropriation of the term “union” for a country with as disparate a set of outlooks and attitudes as this one, but it seems that, in what is more than likely to be Wales Arts Review’s last Christmas, there is a lesson to be taken from the state of Wales’s cultural landscape that can be rolled out into an understanding of the wider health of the country...Keep reading on Wales Arts Review.
Over a period of fifty-odd years, Gore Vidal wrote an end of year reflective essay he called his “State of the Union”. It was partly an alternative take on the annual Presidential address to the American citizenry, and partly, as he explained in his 1975 iteration, a bringing together of all the conversations that he had been having that year “across the republic”.
No doubt Vidal would have found little to titillate his competing appetites for grandeur and gossip in the goings on in Wales, and he may have even found irony in the appropriation of the term “union” for a country with as disparate a set of outlooks and attitudes as this one, but it seems that, in what is more than likely to be Wales Arts Review’s last Christmas, there is a lesson to be taken from the state of Wales’s cultural landscape that can be rolled out into an understanding of the wider health of the country...Keep reading on Wales Arts Review.