“Some people think that art is a luxury and must be cut back in times of crisis. These people must understand that precisely during times of crisis the unforgivable sin is to cut access to art. In my beloved home of Venezuela such a crisis is happening right now. People are spending their days looking for food, medicine and the necessities of life. The same arguments exist — how can we fund music — the arts — when basic needs are not being met?”
Author: Douglas McLennan
What The Literary World Is Saying About Bob Dylan Winning The Nobel
“Though Dylan was long rumored to be a contender for the Nobel, the possibility had attained a kind of mythical, some might say comic, status. And after waiting 23 years for an American to win the literature prize — Toni Morrison was our last one — wouldn’t the Swedes finally recognize DeLillo or Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates? You know, people who actually write literature? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
Jacob Weisberg Explains The Corrupting Influence Of the Attention Economy
The old cliché about advertising was, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The new cliché is, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” In an attention economy, you pay for free content and services with your time. The compensation isn’t very good.
A Literature Nobel For Songwriting? Not Quite
Handwringing about “what is literature?” seems inevitable after the announcement that a rock star has taken the global writing community’s biggest award. But no great existential crisis is needed. The Nobel Committee could have decided that with this prize it wanted to expand the definition of “literature” to include recorded music, a hugely influential and relatively young art form that doesn’t have an award of Nobel-like prestige dedicated to it. But it seems to have declined to do so.
The Sentimentality Trap
“Sentimentality offers us the dubious chance to feel while bypassing the messiness of any real human engagement: not too much feeling but too thin an experience.”
Playwright Dario Fo, 90
“He was best known for two works: “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” (1970), a play based on the case of an Italian railroad worker who was either thrown or fell from the upper story of a Milan police station while being questioned on suspicion of terrorism, and for his one-man show “Mistero Buffo” (“Comic Mystery”), written in 1969 and frequently revised and updated over the next 30 years, taking wild comic aim at politics and especially religion.”
Funding Turns Towards Creative Placemaking Experiments
“High-profile funders, be it the NEA, Kresge, Surdna, Knight, and ArtPlace America—just to name a few—agree that, much like the cultivation of wheat, creative placemaking is an art and a science. Trial and error is to be expected. And the larger the body of literature gets around getting creative placemaking right, the better off we’ll all be.”
Critic Jonathan Jones And Artist Grayson Perry Duke It Out In A War Of Words
“Grayson Perry is what happens when art becomes a pseudo intellectual entertainment for a world that is too busy to look and too distracted to feel: an artist for people who can’t be bothered with art. Now put that on a pot.”
Data: Is The Art Market Racially Biased?
“To find out how African American artists fare at auction, we take a look at data from the last 30 years, focusing on American artists born after 1955. For this analysis, rather than individual prices, we focus on auction volume (the total of their sales in a given year), which offers a broader reflection of the appetite for artists’ work.”
Washington’s National Gallery Unveils A Spruced-up East Building
“Although the improved East Building wasn’t exactly swamped its debut weekend, oddly angled tower rooms make sharing the space with culturally curious strangers a strenuous exercise in loving one’s fellow man.”