Category: issues

In the museum’s storage areas and display rooms, there are some 3,800 suitcases, along with 5,000 toothbrushes and 110,000 shoes and shoe remnants. There are also mountains of human hair, prosthetic limbs, eyeglasses and other things left behind by the prisoners. It all amounts to a huge number of artifacts given the museum’s storage capacity — but relative to the vast number of victims, it isn’t much. – Der Spiegel

‘We really see that we have a role in creating pathways for creative people who are local and who are in the community to create work, have their ideas and get their work onto a stage – pathways for their work to find its way out into the wider world. And then the other way is pathways into this region, bringing work from the rest of the world to Geelong to keep us excited about what the arts are. That’s one of the ways that we’re starting to think about it for ourselves.’ – ArtsHub

Administrators in the UK culture ministry took proposals for specific projects of up to £7 million. The first five winners, to share £20 million, are the Thames Estuary, Wakefield in Yorkshire, Worcester in the English Midlands, Grimsby in northeast England, and Plymouth in the southwest. — The Guardian

Low value? The right-leaning group says that some arts degrees offer poor income prospects for graduates and little economic return for the government that supports such degrees. This thinking, of course, assumes that “value” is purely economic… – The Stage

For centuries, the Catholic Church was one of the world’s most important collectors and patrons of art, but in recent decades, the Vatican’s holiday nativity scene has often been one of its most high-profile artistic contributions. This shift didn’t happen overnight—or even in a generation—but across centuries, and it is inseparable from the evolution of modern European nations, the secularization of public life, and the rise of the art market. – Artsy

The dropout rate at American universities has been high. What to do? Use mountains of data to find better ways of predicting who will do well when they get in. And no, it’s not just looking at whether you got good grades (duh)… – Politico

Dan Vo leads groups on #QueerMuseum tours of Cambridge museums and the V&A, pointing out things like an Antarctic explorer’s scandalized notes on male-on-male penguin sex and a “gender-fluid” statue of Lucifer. Alice Procter’s “Uncomfortable Art” tours through the likes of the British Museum point out the ways colonialism pervades the collections. — The New York Times

Even if the person wearing dreadlocks is not racist himself, the group says, the chosen hairstyle “conveys racism.” It calls cultural appropriation “a form of passive oppression, a privilege to be deconstructed and in particular a manifestation of ordinary racism.” – Toronto Star (CP)