Category: issues

Thanks To Met Museum Admission Fees, New York City To Give $2.8 Million To Smaller Arts Groups

As part of the City’s agreement to let the Met charge non-New Yorkers a mandatory admission fee, the museum is to give the City a portion of the new revenues for grants to other organizations. Now the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs has announced that it will distribute $2.8 million of those revenues to 175 groups throughout the five boroughs. – ARTnews

Once Again. Trump’s Proposed Budget Defunds NEA, NEH, Public Broadcasting, Libraries

“For the third time in as many years, the White House has proposed a federal budget that would shutter the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which supports PBS and NPR — and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Like last year, the plan provides small appropriations for each agency to facilitate its orderly demise.” – The Washington Post

How Nightclub Culture Drives Popular Culture

Anyone with an Instagramaccount, a fashion magazine subscription or an interest in social activism is ultimately engaging with club culture. Nightlife is like an angel investor in pop culture, silently incubating grassroots movements and social moments, and since the first iterations of the disco, clubs have been a breeding ground for cultural experimentation. – The Guardian

Some Concerns About “Cultural Democracy” And What It Means For Artists And The Arts

Cultural democracy is, in its essence, anti-elitist. It denounces the superiority of one form of culture over others and includes amateur arts, lifestyles, folk creativity, and traditional practices. Diversity and free choice are key, and culture should be available as an integral part of everyday life. It was the kind of thing I benefited from in my childhood. It comes as no surprise that the term “cultural democracy” is still on the table as the buzz answer to the figures that show only a small slice of society benefits from the subsidies for the arts. – Howlround

Hudson Yards’ Monument To Wealth

Rather than a vision of the future, Hudson Yards takes a snapshot of the concentrated-wealth present. It is the physical expression of the tensions between the developer’s focus on moneymaking, the complications of the site, and complex public agendas. Hudson Yards is an untidy collage of all the forces that have acted on it. – CityLab

One Of Philadelphia’s Last Independent Live Venues Is Set To Close

The iconic Trocadero is going out in May, according to owner Joanna Pang, who says (and this is depressing as heck) “The landscape of the business has changed in the last five years. It’s harder now to be an independently run venue — it’s a different world. There are bigger rooms run by bigger concert corporations.” That is, Live Nation. – Variety

British Actor Juliet Stevenson Calls Brexit A Retrograde Step That Will Make Collaboration Harder

Stevenson was among many other arts leaders in Britain who said Brexit was a terrible idea. She added, “I spent last year filming a series called Riviera, which had a French crew, Belgian director, German camera man, English, Swiss and American casts, and it’s particularly those sorts of things that are going to be much harder.” – The Stage (UK)

Indigenous Australian Artists: It’s Time We Stop Being Reviewed By White Culture

“It feels like a moment where we are angry and ready enough to address how white Australian review culture maligns Indigenous work by only superficially engaging with it. It feels like a moment where we are ready to sustain our own review culture. We have centuries of white engagement with Indigenous story as evidence for the need to change; we also have our own critics, who show us what’s possible when whiteness loses its frame of evaluative authority over a work.” – The Guardian