Category: issues

For 38 years since Zimbabwe’s independence, there has never been a single government ministry dedicated to the arts only. Yes, we understand the need for government to trim down its Cabinet and to save money, but if they ever thought that the arts were an important societal need, a separate ministry for the arts would have been created.

The Policy Institute at King’s College London will study the effect of the creative education programme on students’ development, examining how arts education can help young people overcome challenging circumstances. By measuring the effect of the programme on the students’ personal and academic development, the institute aims to generate valuable evidence that provides a “greater understanding of effective ways to engage with young people”.

Columbus Day, named for the Italian explorer who sailed to the Americas on behalf of Spain more than 500 years ago, has become a painful reminder of the oppression endured by native peoples. At the same time, the holiday remains an important part of Italian-American heritage, and for many, it is one worth keeping.

A new front in Australia’s culture wars has opened following NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s decision to order the management of Sydney Opera House to light up the sails with a promotion for next weekend’s $13 million Everest horse race.

“I find it extraordinary that the state politicians on both sides have somehow decided that this is in the interests of Sydney, New South Wales or Australia to corrupt the way the Opera House works, to corrupt art integrity of the building and to be able to use it in any way a politician wants,” Michael Lynch told ABC radio on Monday. Lynch ran the Opera House from 1998 to 2002.

Expectations have been raised that a tourist tax could help ease the burden on the public purse of the festivals – but does that put their future public funding under threat?

In 2003, Hull was named the UK’s number one ‘Crap Town’, according to Sam Jordison’s less-than-favourable alternative city guide. Ten years later, it was named the successful bidder for UK City of Culture 2017. There were numerous facets to the success of Hull’s City of Culture bid and year. Winning it was a reflection of the huge collective power of a city to make change happen, and what can be achieved in the arts when we come together as a sector to achieve a common objective.

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable.

From the earliest expositions in London and Paris, through the early 20th-century fairs that introduced such American cities as St. Louis, Chicago, Buffalo, and San Francisco to the world, the starry-eyed futurism of the New York fair in 1939, and the coming-out parties of Seattle, (’62), Osaka (’70), Montreal (’67), and post-dictatorship Seville (’92) and Lisbon (’98), World’s Fairs announced that their host cities were open for business and a bright future was coming. Then they lost their luster? No, in fact — like so much manufacturing, they went to Asia. “How much optimism or innocence one might think World’s Fairs have lost,” writes Darran Anderson, “depends on how much one believes they had to begin with.”