Category: issues

“To be displayed in this museum, objects have to have been an innovation, have to have failed and have to be interesting, explains the museum’s curator Samuel West. He defines failure as ‘a deviation from expected results’.” For example? “Sony Betamax, an electrocuting face mask and a Swedish alternative to marshmallows.” (video) — BBC

“The controversial initiative, which is due to launch on 1 May [at the rate of €3], applies to day-trippers … From early 2020, the fee will rise to between €6 and €10 depending on the time of year. The cost will be incorporated into tickets of tourists who arrive by cruise ship, in water taxis and by plane or train.” — The Art Newspaper

“Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state. For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry. But in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession.” – Foreign Affairs

“Lincoln Center, which has been buffeted by leadership churn in recent years, has looked to Broadway and academia for its last two presidents. They didn’t take. Now it is looking to the East Side of Manhattan, and to someone with a background running a large nonprofit cultural and community center.” — The New York Times

Business models for virtually every industry are changing – and many industries are seeing their foundations rocked. So how to find new ways to support the arts? In the UK the Cultural Cities Enquiry makes a series of suggestions, including a tax on tourism. – The Stage (UK)

“According to Drexel, museum, and city officials, the university would oversee pruning the vast number of objects — there are more than 100,000 items in the collection — to a ‘manageable’ size, digitizing the whole kit and kaboodle, and making it all available online, suitable for searching by institutions in need of loans or those seeking to mount new exhibitions.” The museum’s historic building will be closed and possibly sold. — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Carter Gillies: “Either we say that improving health, wellbeing and social outcomes is our proper motivation, or we admit that the value of the arts is different to this. If instrumental benefits are what truly matters, then it may be necessary to sacrifice some art that doesn’t meet these criteria. We can hold on to the ideal of instrumentality, or to art that does not show evidence of instrumental benefits. But we can’t have it both ways.” – Arts Professional

“The distress sale of its building to Johns Hopkins University … has become a cautionary tale of bloated budgets and unrealized ambition. The museum has been weighted down by crushing debt and beset by management upheaval, and its downfall has long been foretold, but it is still a gut punch to an industry labeled the ‘enemy of the people’ by President Trump and struggling with digital-era financial troubles galore.” — The Washington Post

Students are actively integrated into a system that collects data about their behavior, quantifies it, and packages it for parents and the school itself. In an era of data rooms and standardized testing, when education has become a rigorous science, ClassDojo may seem like nothing new. After all, students have been ruthlessly quantified since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. But ClassDojo seeks to create docile bodies in the classroom, and it does this by monitoring and collecting enormous amounts of data on students. – Los Angeles Review of Books