Though commonly viewed as disparate, the arts establishment often works in parallel with political and corporate establishments. Despite Saudi’s well-documented involvement in 9/11, its deplorable human rights record, its support of militias in Iraq and Syria, and its war on Yemen, which has caused the most extreme, and preventable, humanitarian crisis of our time, a positive relationship with the Kingdom, and certainly MBS, has been pursued. Far from hidden prior to Khashoggi’s murder. It simply didn’t matter.
Category: issues
Publishers Say TSA Detained And Harassed Them Because Agent Didn’t Like One Of Their Books
An art book publisher and his companion were about to fly out of LaGuardia after a fair when, following a routine search of the books they were traveling with, they were held in a room and questioned about a book whose content one of the TSA officers disliked, and that the officers damaged the book and berated them about it. (A TSA spokeswoman denied that the incident could have taken place.)
In London, A Beloved Independent Cinema Decides Not To Hand Over Control To A Commercial Theatre Group
The Phoenix Cinema has been run by a trust since 1912 (when it was the East Finchley Picturedrome), but the board was ready to sell to Curzon until protests by staff and patrons, including directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach and actor Michael Palin, convinced it that wasn’t going to work.
Social Media May Be Squashing Human Spirituality, Not To Mention Hope
At least, that’s one thing that Silicon Valley expert Jaron Lanier claims – and it’s because of, well, Silicon Valley companies. “This whole architecture is on every level based on sneakiness and manipulation, often using weird behaviorist, hypnotic, unacknowledged techniques to get people more and more engaged or addicted and persuaded, or to get them into compulsive behavior patterns that aren’t necessarily in their own interest.”
So Just How Are Arts Organizations Supposed To Measure Social Impact?
At the London Film Festival last week, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced it was going to start measuring ‘class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. This move reflects the growing attention given to inequalities in the arts: academic evidence increasingly shows that cultural professions are unequal across ethnicity, gender, age, disability and class. How we measure class and social mobility to reveal inequality is a thorny issue, however.
Berlin’s Independent Artists Want The City’s Cultural Funding To Be Less Institutional
Ninety-five percent of the cultural budget goes towards funding big institutions—operas, theatres, and art collections—whereas the independent scene receives the remaining 5 percent for individual projects and grants. The forty to fifty thousand independent cultural workers in the city have recently demanded for this imbalance to be changed. Artists’ political engagement is often the catalyst for a strong and diverse urban democracy, and it is therefore important to understand why and how they get engaged in politics.
Arts Professionals Eye Brazil’s New President Warily
“[Jair] Bolsonaro has said that he wants to dissolve or merge various government bodies, including the ministry of culture, and has expressed little support toward rebuilding the devastated National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, telling the Associated Press earlier this year: ‘It caught fire already. What do you want me to do?’ … Few [arts professionals] would speak about their concerns on the record, perhaps because of Bolsonaro’s apparent sympathies with authoritarianism, or the fact that government funding supports a significant part of Brazil’s cultural production.”
So How Do You Measure The Impact Of Your Work As An Artist?
“Unlike arts organizations that might have resources for evaluating the impact of their programs, individual artists often lack the capacity to measure how their projects drive social change. They are active. They are doing the work. Providing independent artists with clear content for their own advocacy, and boosting their own research capacities, is vitally important to driving evidence-based practice in the field. I know this because I am one of them.”
Colleges Go On The Offensive To Recruit Humanities Students For Lagging Programs
To avoid further slippage in humanities majors, elite colleges and universities have resorted to an all-out campaign to persuade students that such degrees aren’t just tickets to jobs as bartenders and Starbucks baristas. Colleges are starting early with that push.
Arts Orgs Have Big Social Impact In Metro Seattle, Finds Study
The ArtsFund study of King County, Wash.,”finds that ‘arts are a viable and proven — yet often underutilized and unacknowledged — strategy to positively transform and benefit our communities.’ Translation: A robust arts scene with well-funded arts organizations isn’t just ‘nice to have.’ … This study proves the arts can help solve serious problems facing this region in particular, including homelessness, inequitable and inadequate education, and general divisiveness. The only problem? Well, there’s a couple problems.”