"New York is living through a moment of cultural reckoning. The American Folk Art Museum, the preeminent gallery for outsider art, has just shut its doors for good, saddled with millions of dollars in debt. The New York City Opera, which in its heyday mounted 20 productions a season at Lincoln Center, can no longer pay the rent on its theatre and has finally announced a wretchedly abridged season, staged in borrowed space around town. So perhaps the precariousness of our cultural moment explains how weak-kneed the city has gone for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which arrived in town with alarums and excursions this summer for a two-month residency. New York is no longer much of an artistic powerhouse, and the arrival of dozens of actors and technicians at the height of this sweltering summer came almost as a relief." [Source]
