Category: issues

The Nathan Rapaport sculpture Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs has been at the site, near the eastern end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, since 1964, but around it has been built a new $13 million plaza that includes those artifacts — plus testimony about them from survivors, available via a free app.

“The five fragments now believed to have ‘characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin’ have been displayed at the Museum of the Bible since it opened in November. Labels on the exhibit since it opened have warned guests that some scholars were skeptical of the fragments’ authenticity.”

“The mooted cut – which would amount to just under £1m (30%) across the entire arts portfolio – would be on top of a combined £1.7m reduction in 2017 (34%), and a 25% cut the year before. It comes less than a year after the [city] council announced its intention to hold arts funding at a standstill until 2020.”

By turns galumphing and graceful, the roughly £260m hulk contains an opera house, concert hall, theatre and recital hall, seating up to 7,000 people within its curvaceous shell. As Taiwan faces ever more pressure for assimilation from mainland China, whose cultural building boom has led to a new museum or concert hall open practically every week in recent years, the National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts, AKA Weiwuying, is a monumental statement that this plucky nation means business on the international cultural stage.

Florida’s central aim, as I read it, was to have cities and states rethink industrial policy—but not by ignoring housing, transportation, health policies and other important aspects of running large cities. Rather, I read it as forcing a serious look into the economic consequences of cultural spaces. Sadly, his book and corresponding creative class thesis gave many urban policy professionals the cover to give up on the constellation of policies and remedies aimed at decreasing inequality, and widen the wealth gap.

On South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, a substantial number of Native households earn income by creating and selling art. But many of these residents lack access to the transportation and financing that would enable them to market and grow their businesses. So – the Rolling Rez, a mobile art bus that travels…

Whew: “If you act like you are the center of the world, you should actually be the center, or something close to it. As things currently stand, though, the British soon won’t even be within shouting distance of the center of Europe. The United Kingdom is currently demonstrating how a country can make a fool of itself before the eyes of the entire world.”

Jill Lepore has surmised, is that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the period, and yet lost to us.” Lepore’s training as a historian, she’s said, tried to teach her that these things did not contain worthy explanations. In graduate school her interest in them “looked like a liability, and I took note.”

The principal belief is that supporting the arts and culture is not a luxury but an investment in human progress. It is the necessary scaffolding for building and sustaining civil society. It is the cornerstone for human growth and development.

Vladimir Medinsky told a room full of worthies at an Aspen/Davos-type gathering in Sochi, “Soon we’ll be saying that rap is Russian art. Of course, it was born somewhere in America, but its flourishing occurred with us, of course.” Just like ballet. Then Medinsky pronounced that the very first rapper was, in fact, early Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.