“So where does that leave the middle class, those galleries in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side that have been around long enough to be somewhat established, but still have to sell enough to make rent? Now, they have to deal with a perfect storm of gallery-killing factors: a market cooling from top to bottom, plummeting prices for onetime hit artists who minted money for mid-tier galleries just two years ago, the chokehold of fair booth prices, skyrocketing rents in neighborhoods where buying a building is unthinkable.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
What Lessons Should Artists Learn From The Trump Election?
“History and our own recent experience suggest that some soul-searching assessment of the limits of our own gestures, and some clear-eyed analysis of what rhetoric is effective and what is not, is going to be very, very important in the years to come. It will not be enough to languish in mythological beliefs about art’s value as a humanistic salve, or even to fly the flag for “political art” as a genre. We have to debate strategy. Otherwise, we will delude ourselves with endless anti-Trump symbolic theater, applauding our own virtues and confirming our own righteousness within our prescribed sphere, but not advancing one step in the battle of ideas.”
Another Big City Newspaper Decimates Its Arts Coverage
It’s the Edmonton Journal: “Theatre writer Liz Nicholls and music writer Sandra Sperounes and have both taken buyouts and will leave the paper on Dec. 2. The owners PostMedia announced in October it was going to cut staff across the board by 20%, voluntary buyouts first, layoffs if there aren’t enough volunteers.”
1000 Prominent Canadian Artists Petition Government To “Fix” The Business Of Creativity
They argue that despite their creativity and innovation, many of them are being squeezed out of a marketplace that monetizes digital distribution without fairly paying content creators: “The middle-class artist is being eliminated from the Canadian economy. Full-time creativity is becoming a thing of the past,” the letter says. “The carefully designed laws and regulations of the 1990s were intended to ensure that both Canadian creators and technological innovators would benefit from digital developments. We hoped that new technology would enrich the cultural experiences for artists and consumers alike. Unfortunately, this has not happened,” the letter continues.
Reinvent Canada’s CBC Model? What A Cranky Idea!
“The idea that CBC television and radio is a frivolity, sucking up vast amounts of money to make bad TV and irrelevant radio, is the position of a small number of well-off cranks in Toronto and Montreal, aided by a number of other cranks who, one imagines, stave off personal wretchedness by ceaselessly pointing out that the CBC gets funding to make TV and radio, while they don’t.”
New Evidence That The Brains Of Creative People Are Wired Differently
In their main finding, the researchers report the ability to make connections between distant concepts was associated with “structural variation” of several specific brain regions, one of which “was connected to distant regions through long-range pathways.”
Canadian Data: Arts Attendance Shrank Over 20 Years – Is Accessibility The Problem?
“Of the eight areas the index tracks, culture and leisure was the one that showed the most steady decline over the past 20 years: Participation was hit hard by the recession in 2008 and while it has recovered somewhat, it remains well below what it was in the 1990s. So, the report certainly reinforces the perception that arts audiences are shrinking – but it also provides a social and economic context for these losses that could be useful for those who want to turn the situation around.”
American Television Struggles With How To Portray Muslims
“As an artist, you want to stay true to the narrative, and sometimes that goes against your activist agenda, which is to promote this positive image of Muslims. At the same time, to balance that with a truth that exists, in terms of my own experience with Islam, which may not always be necessarily positive.”
Playing Video Games Changes Us. The Question Is How…
“We spend so much time debating the dubious proposition that video games cause violence that we rarely get around to considering how else our lives and selves might be shaped by a $91 billion industry catering to 155 million Americans. As a result, gaming’s defenders, fearful of censorship, rarely get nudged in the direction of self-reflection.”
This Year’s Story On How Third-Place Auction House Phillips Is Moving Up On Sotheby’s, Christie’s
The Phillips specialists acknowledge that their November sale was only an opening move; the larger effort to disrupt the duopoly has just begun. “We’re still in this phase when we get the sympathy vote. I don’t think it’s a giant leap. It’s just a good step to take.”