Come Monday, Cincinnati's CET will unveil what the Public Broadcasting System says is the first public television station to devote one of its new digital channels to 24/7 arts programming. The immediate impact of CETarts will be to offer expanded broadcast of PBS shows CET already features on its primary channel, but in the long term the Channel 48 folks wants to develop some local arts programming for the channel and already has meetings scheduled with various organizations.
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Cincinnati Art Museum's Reel Art film series — movies with a strong connection to the visual arts — starts a new season Friday with 'Zabriskie Point.' It's a great lineup ... and I don't just say that because I'll be the guest speaker after that film's repeat screening Sunday.

In what was a tough year economically for the visual arts, Cincinnati museums managed to not only put on some excellent shows but to draw respectable crowds to see them. The Cincinnati Art Museum may have had to put its expansion plans on hold as the recession grinded on, but it used 2009 to present some of the new gifts that would look great on permanent display.
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Cincinnati’s King Records had another good year in 2009, even though the pioneering R&B/Soul/Country label for all practical purposes left the city — and ceased having any meaningful impact on popular music — when its founder, Syd Nathan, died in 1968.
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The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an international organization that seeks to preserve, maintain and educate the public about all existing structures by the iconic American architect, will be holding its national conference in Cincinnati next year.

Since Louisville’s 21c Museum Hotel has announced a planned expansion into downtown Cincinnati, the discussion has centered on two issues: What does snagging an award-winning boutique hotel mean to local economic development and what will happen to the low-income residents of the Metropole Apartments? Important questions, but as an arts writer they're not my bailiwick. I can, however, offer some insight into what 21c might mean for the visual (and other) arts in Cincinnati.
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Hopefully, by the time you read this (or shortly thereafter) the Cincinnati Art Museum will have opened 'Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry,' the twice-delayed exhibition of more than 100 turn-of-20th-Century pieces from the finest American and European designers and jewelers.

Northside is known as Cincinnati's hippest, artiest neighborhood, so it's fitting that a new "post-outsider art" gallery (Thunder-Sky Inc.) will open there Oct. 30. It couldn't have a better location: 4573 Hamilton Ave. in the string of storefronts that also includes The Comet and N-Vision.
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With the opening of 'Chewing Color,' the new exhibition of the subversive, questioning, unnervingly intimate and maddeningly beautiful fashion photography of Marilyn Minter, the Contemporary Arts Center now has three simultaneous exhibitions that prominently feature video work. That should tell you something about where contemporary art is going.
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A recent trip to Wisconsin reaffirmed for me the exciting correctness of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s efforts to build collections in Folk/Outsider Art and Contemporary Crafts. This year, the museum has displayed work from two new collections — Chicago collector Robert Lewis’ Outsider Art and Cincinnati collectors of Contemporary Craft Nancy and David Wolf.
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