In its fiscal 2013 budget introduced yesterday, the D.C. Council increased the amount allocated to the District's Commission on the Arts and Humanities by $6.8 million, pushing funding for that agency to its highest level since 2009. more ›

After being chipped away at for the past few years, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities is getting a bump in Mayor Vince Gray's budget for the 2013 fiscal year to as much as $7.6 million. more ›

Looking at President Obama's proposed budget for fiscal year 2013, it appears the White House is still trying to turn a small, but vital arts grant program over to District control, but the lack of specifics isn't promising. more ›

It was a rough year for government support of the arts in 2011. Federal and local governments scaled back their funding, in some cases forcing cultural institutions to make significant programming cuts. more ›

Some potentially bad news for local arts crept under our radar at the end of February. The Virginia House of Delegates passed a budget proposal that includes a 50 percent cut to funding for the Commission for the Arts next year, and the total elimination of the agency by July 1, 2011. more ›

Daisey is due lots of credit for his willingness to bite the hand that feeds him, if only just. He calls himself a "carrion bird of the American theater," aware that his popular monologues -- 2001's 21 Dog Years, about his spell as an Amazon.com clock-puncher; and last summer's Fringe Fest hit, If You See Something, Say Something, skewering our post-9/11 tendency to see terrorists in our cereal, among them -- appeal to theaters chiefly because they cost peanuts. He knows that if he's on the stage, then a play is not. He gets some comic mileage early on by reeling off the usual suspects in the murder of American stagecraft: Reagan, the Disney megalith, iPods, and (ahem) critics. But when he comes round to prosecuting his case, his target turns out to be the theater companies themselves, particularly the ones mortgaging their futures to ornate new buildings when they literally can't give tickets away to people younger than 30 to replenish an audience that's aging and dying off. "You only play to the people in the house, and there are less of them every year," Daisey observes ominously. more ›