Johnson threw his weight behind expensive projects such as a new cultural and educational quarter and the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the Olympic Park, and relocating the Museum of London to Smithfield. But on other aspects of arts and culture funding, his record is patchy. – Arts Professional
Category: issues
Tel Aviv’s Grotty Central Bus Station Is Becoming A Hotbed Of Experimental Art And Theatre
It’s a seven-story, five-block-long concrete hulk with cheap clothing and electronics stores and hair salons, along with lots of abandoned space and a colony of bats. But in the past few years, artists have made their move on the place: there’s colorful graffiti on the 7th floor, installations on the 5th, an architecture exhibit on the 4th, and a theatre company that uses all seven levels for immersive productions. – The Washington Post
Why Learning Is Declining In Our Classrooms
The combination of computer use, Internet, and smart phone, I would argue, has changed the cognitive skills required of individuals. Learning is more and more a matter of mastering various arbitrary software procedures that then allow information to be accessed and complex operations to be performed without our needing to understand what is entailed in those operations. This activity is then carried on in an environment where it is quite normal to perform two, three, or even four operations at the same time, with a general and constant confusion of the social, the academic, and the occupational. – New York Review of Books
UK’s Creative Industries May Face Labor Problems After Brexit
“The prevalence of freelance workers in the sector – 50% of companies surveyed had used freelancers in the past year – and EU workers among them, meant that ‘one in ten businesses in the creative industries employ a freelance worker who might be unable to gain continued access to the UK workforce’ after Brexit.” – Arts Professional
Report: Notre Dame Fire May Have Poisoned Local Residents With Lead
According to confidential documents leaked to the (paywalled) website Mediapart earlier this month and discussed across French media, locations surrounding the fire-damaged cathedral have registered levels of lead contamination ranging between 500 and 800 times the official safe level. – CityLab
Here’s A Place Where Prescribing The Arts As Medical Treatment Seems To Be Working
Four cities in Denmark are running pilot versions of a program called Kulturvitaminer (culture vitamins), partly funded by the national health ministry, that gets people on long-term sickness/disability leave or unemployment involved in cultural activities — as both viewers and participants. – The Guardian
Orlando’s Philharmonic, Opera And Ballet Companies Say They Can’t Afford The Rent On The Venue Being Built For Them
“Although the downtown Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts has long touted itself as the future home of the Orlando Philharmonic, Orlando Ballet and Opera Orlando, arts leaders say their nonprofit groups are being priced out of … the center’s new Steinmetz Hall, which was designed with those groups in mind.” – Orlando Sentinel
New York City To Arts Orgs: We Both Know You Have A Diversity Problem — How Are You Going To Fix It?
“After years spent measuring and analyzing the problem, the city is now asking organizations to work on fixing it. In recent months, 33 cultural institutions on city-owned property submitted plans to boost diversity and inclusion among their staff and visitors; if they failed to do so, the city warned, their funding could be cut.” – The New York Times
One-Third Of All England’s National Arts Funding Goes To London
“The £215m given to London organisations in 2018/19 is a much smaller proportion of total Arts Council England (ACE) funding than they received in 2012/13, when 82% went to the capital. But it is still almost 10 times more per capita than some other areas get.” – Arts Professional
How Erdogan Purged Turkey’s Intellectuals
“An authoritarian state can do many things to get rid of these democratic types — put them in jail, put them on trial — but ultimately the government must attack the institutions that produce and sustain them. Newspapers can be easy to buy. NGOs are easy to shut down. Universities are much harder to dismantle. But this is what, through the great purge, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his allies sought to do.” – New York Times Magazine