Category: issues

“A delegation from the festivals has this week met with Caroline Nokes, the Minister of State for Immigration, in a bid to ease the apparent clampdown on visiting artists to the UK … [that led to] the visa crisis experienced by artists at last year’s festival.” – The Herald (Scotland)

Leila Jancovich: “When managing the [2002] Commonwealth Games cultural programme in Manchester, both myself and our independent evaluator were asked to remove learning points from our reports for fear they might appear negative. Instead, we were encouraged to focus on celebratory facts and figures. But I strongly believed then – and believe now – that we learn more from failure than success. ” – Arts Professional

“A survey from the Pew Research Center in 2016 found that, among US workers employed part-time, 64 per cent prefer it that way. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of full-time workers – that’s almost 26 million Americans – would rather work part-time.” – Aeon

“Despite the constant avowal and assertion of the intrinsic value of arts and culture, funding for art and culture is still often treated as a discretionary spend which is somehow secondary to the needs of what are defined as being more essential services like the NHS. But art and culture do not only make a huge contribution in their own right to the taxation which funds those essential services. They are also the principal reason for the constantly acclaimed commercial success of the creative industries, which make an even larger contribution to the public purse, which funds those essential services we all value.” – Arts Professional

Gov. Jay Pritzker’s infrastructure spending bill, the state’s first major public works program in more than ten years, just passed the state legislature, and it includes over $60 million in money for capital projects at various arts institutions. And there’s another $50 million for capital projects to be allocated by the Illinois Arts Council. – Chicago Tribune

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart made the case in the 1990s: “What kind of a role model was he, this eunuch duck, who sought only fame and fortune, who ignored the plight of the working class, who accepted endless suffering as his lot? “Reading Disney,” they wrote, “is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat.” – The New Yorker

This is no small shift. For the past quarter-century, the charter school movement has been a juggernaut. Charters were originally devised by technocrats hoping to inject “free market dogmas into the public sector,” as Rachel Cohen wrote in the journal Democracy. The idea was expertly packaged and sold for a broad audience — as a low-cost way to advance the twin aims of excellence and equity. – Washington Post

The Treasury Department said in a statement that the U.S. will no longer allow the group educational and cultural trips known as “people to people” travel to the island. Those trips have been used by thousands of American citizens to visit the island even before the U.S. restored full diplomatic relations with the communist government in December 2014. – PBS News Hour

“At stake is whether the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) can use state money for travel costs and continue to provide grants for individual artists — longtime recipients of the agency’s past investments.” – WBUR (Boston)

Rates of pay haven’t increased, as the cost of living continues to climb and, anecdotally, some arts workers are being asked by funders to justify their salaries, in a way that wouldn’t be required, at that level of remuneration, in any other industry. So why is it considered not only acceptable, but entirely appropriate in the arts? – Irish Times