Modern narratives of capitalist development often assume that vast wealth accumulated by a few accompanies improved circumstances for many. The history of slavery’s capitalism warns against all these expectations.
Author: Douglas McLennan
UK Festival Directors Lobby Against Complex, Expensive, Cumbersome Artist Visa Process
“The overly complex process leads to mistakes being made by both applicants and by assessors, and refusals being made for visas that could theoretically be granted. The situation has led to artists now telling festivals they are much more reluctant to accept invitations to come to the UK due to the visa process, despite the assistance we receive from bodies such as the British Council and UK embassies across the world.”
How Art For Justice Aims To Reduce Mass Incarceration
It’s worth remembering that the Art for Justice Fund is barely a year old. Yet in that short time frame, the fund, along with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, has placed the issue of mass incarceration front and center across the arts giving landscape. The rapid evolution of Art for Justice has provided socially driven funders with a template for leveraging the arts to change public policy, and has shown metrics-driven naysayers—often referred to as “effective altruists”—how the arts can drive measurable positive outcomes.
Singer Claims Two Classical Music Stars Raped Him
Samuel Schultz, then a 23-year-old graduate student at Rice University, says he was frightened of repercussions and hid the alleged event for years. Emboldened by both the #MeToo movement and upon learning that David Daniels had made tenure at the University of Michigan — where he’d be in close personal contact with young aspiring singers — Schultz filed a complaint with the U-M Police Department’s special victims unit in July.
A New Gehry-Designed Concert Hall In LA Has Big Implications For The Future Of Orchestras
The YOLA Center in Inglewood is a milestone project for the LA Phil’s Youth Orchestra LA project. Not only will it be a way to produce an unprecedented ethnically diverse new generation of musicians but it also promises to be a new model for ways a cultural institution can serve a community, with the added cachet of it being designed by the architect behind Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Increasingly Irish Arts Are Built On The Backs Of Interns
The arts in Ireland are built on top of unpaid labour. Everyone in the industry knows this. Sporadically, there is outrage about unreasonable advertisements seeking unpaid internships (recent culprits included TV3 and the Fringe Festival) but the hubbub eventually dies away and little changes. Unpaid labour takes different forms. There are the artists, writers and musicians who often create their work for little or no money and can be exploited for this by an entertainment and arts industry eager for content. There are also volunteers who do admittedly valuable work that comes, if truly a form of volunteerism, with no contractual obligations or real responsibility. Internships, on the other hand, are technically meant to be a form of skills training. In recent years, however, “internship” has become shorthand for “unpaid job” and the means by which Irish arts institutions coped with funding shortfalls.
Should Artists Be Fundraisers?
“Should we now encourage, if not outright expect, artists to take a more active and ongoing role in the fundraising business? If they indeed occupy a position that might increase their chances of succeeding at, or contributing to, the success of fundraising, shouldn’t, in the current landscape of the difficulty in fundraising, they be part of the process?”
UK Arts Orgs Report On Their Experiences With Crowdfunding
“The majority of respondents indicated that the hard work involved in running a crowdfunding campaign was ultimately worth the rewards and that the matched funding element would significantly increase their likelihood of undertaking further crowdfunding”.
What Science Has To Say About Innate Aesthetic Preferences
“Perhaps the most broadly established aesthetic preference is the one of curvature over angularity,” they write. “People like the appearance of otherwise equivalent shapes and objects more if those contours are round rather than sharp and angular, and this is the case in various cultures around the globe.”
It’s Getting More Difficult To Get Visas For Foreign Artists Coming To The US
“The whole system is a kind of trap for the unwary,” says Geoffrey Smith, former board chair at The Washington Ballet and a lawyer who has worked on visa petitions for ballet dancers and companies for four decades. “I’m a lawyer who does this for a living, and I’ve still made a lot of mistakes. The government isn’t going to go out of its way to let you know that you’ve made a mistake or, for that matter, tell you how to fix it.