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Laura Zucker Exit Interview: Three Biggest Challenges For The Arts

Laura Zucker is stepping down after 25 years leading the LA County Arts Commision. Three of the biggest issues facing arts administrators? “Ensuring all students everywhere receive a quality arts education. It’s a social justice issue. Valuing diverse cultural traditions equally, really equally, in terms of opportunity and resources.  The democratization of culture: creating opportunities for the arts to be accessed by everyone, like breathing.”

Arts Journalism Is Disappearing. Can Arts Organizations Do Anything About It?

“Arts organizations and journalists need each other. Yet, to work together effectively, we need to change the mantra from ‘butts in seats’ to ‘civic discourse’ and work with media and the community in a mutually beneficial way. We can be conduits and facilitators, a constant resource to journalists, giving them the ability to experiment. We need to ensure our organizations are building relationships with journalists, editors, bloggers, and influencers, and researching media outlets before pitching.”

How Academic Writing Gets To Be Meaningless

“The use of words without fixed or clear meanings is a major part of what makes academic writing so terrible. People often complain that academic writing is “obscure” or overly convoluted and complex. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either complexity or obscurity in themselves; research papers in the sciences have to be complex and technical, and introducing people to obscure and unfamiliar words or concepts can be a key part of developing human knowledge. The problem largely comes when words are vague and unclear, admitting of many possible interpretations.”

With Technology Comes Power. But It Might Make Us Less Happy

“Lives of artificial bliss handed to us on a platter of biochemical and neuroelectronic manipulation may well turn out to be stifling, unchallenging lives, and the human imagination, if it is not stunted and stupefied by virtual reality and other illusions, is likely to find unpredictable ways to subvert them. We will have found out that gods are never happy.”

Why Isn’t New Opera At Least As Smart As Good TV?

“When was the last time you came out of a new opera — or ANY opera — feeling that you had had a vital, exciting dramatic experience? When was the last time you felt you had lost yourself in another world? It certainly happens. But in general, we judge opera by different standards. We don’t expect it to be as gripping as a work of spoken theater. The long passages of music, and the pace of the singing, slow everything down.”

So Banksy’s Balloon Girl Was Voted “Best-Loved” Art Work In Britain? OMG

Under its fake radicalism, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is the kind of sentimental tosh our great grandparents too would have voted as Britain’s best-loved. Its kitsch pathos resembles one of the most popular Victorian images, John Everett Millais’ painting Bubbles, a picture of a child blowing bubbles used as an advert for Pear’s Soap. Today we laugh at it and sneer at them for liking such soppy stuff. Imagine how future generations will mock us for sanctifying Banksy, the Boaty McBoatface of modern art.

How Is Publishing Doing Now That The We Need Diverse Books Movement Is Three Years Old?

Sometimes, publishing companies or individuals have had to start their own imprints. For instance: Salaam Reads “takes submissions directly from writers. Zareen Jaffery, the imprint’s executive editor (who is also Muslim), says this practice grew out of feedback she received from Muslim writers, who said it was difficult to find an agent.”