Category: issues

“Calling Detroit the new Berlin for its thriving arts scene, Alberto Ibargüen, president, CEO and trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, announced Wednesday that the nonprofit will invest $20 million in arts organizations in the city through 2023.”

There are approximately 131,000 EU nationals working in the arts in the UK, making up 7% of the total workforce. These individuals range from stage technicians to gaming software developers. Freelance and self-employed workers make up 35% of the sector and 33% of EU workers.

Here we show that of 49 cultural WHS located in low-lying coastal areas of the Mediterranean, 37 are at risk from a 100-year flood and 42 from coastal erosion, already today. Until 2100, flood risk may increase by 50% and erosion risk by 13% across the region, with considerably higher increases at individual WHS.

“While Frankenstein may have thwarted his creature’s desire to procreate, [Mary] Shelley’s novel has birthed a seemingly endless stream of adaptations and riffs … There have been camp Frankensteins, feminist Frankensteins, queer Frankensteins, and political Frankensteins of all stripes, which have taken the monster’s murderous revolt against its maker as allegory of everything from scientific overreach to capitalism to racism to war.”

“Head to your local Halloween haunted house or watch a horror movie, and you’ll probably see a creepy Victorian structure that simply exudes terror. But as art historian Sarah Burns points out, in the 1870s, Victorian houses were just … houses. ‘Half a century later, however,’ she writes, ‘that very same style had become a signifier of terror, death, and decay.’ When did we start to associate these houses with creepiness?” Erin Blakemore explains.

Several studies indicate that 20 percent of Manhattan’s storefronts lie vacant—concentrated in the borough’s most trafficked areas, where commercial rents have soared. The worrisome trend—which exists outside of Manhattan, too—suggests a question: What happens when a city becomes too costly to offer the very ingredients that people look for in a city?

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, issued a decree officially confirming the grandiose cultural and tourism development of Al-Ula Province in Saudi Arabia. It is a project born out of a personal commitment by both Macron and the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, so any change in the balance of power in the Kingdom is likely to threaten the undertaking.

“Education charity the Edge Foundation has published a report claiming the narrow academic curriculum offered by the government’s English Baccalaureate is ‘not fit for purpose to tackle a 21st-century economy’. … Experts are claiming that some science students lack the ‘tactile general knowledge’ that can be gained from creative learning, despite exhibiting high exam grades.”

The UK nonprofit Nesta “has launched a new £3.7m fund that will make small repayable loans to English arts, cultural and creative organisations … to help [them] ‘articulate, monitor and evaluate their social impact’. Recipients of longer term loans that can demonstrate they are achieving their goals will be rewarded with lower interest rates.”

“One hundred years ago, you would have day clothes for the street, dinner clothes for the restaurant, theater clothes, and so many genres of dress. Those barriers have come down. Athleisure is the ultimate breaking down of barriers.”