Category: issues

In Matera, most of the venues are still unbuilt or unrenovated, and neither the rail line from Rome mor the new highway are finished. “Rome and Brussels secured €400m (£360m) to organise the year’s events, money that was supposed to pay for restoring buildings and repairing streets in a place famed for its stunning but dilapidated beauty and history of dire poverty. But … most of the money is still trapped in the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy and has not yet been spent.”

The Grey’s Anatomy star made headlines by leaning in last year, and she says, “Women approached me on the street in tears — crying — and it is really interesting how as women we are really not used to, or accustomed to being forceful and asking for what we want, or asking for what we deserve, or speaking up, or speaking our mind.” But after a couple of other cast members were written off the show, the tone of fan response changed.

Mark Steines says he was fired when he supported women who said they were sexually harassed at the channel. “Steines alleges that the Hallmark Channel allowed [Woody] Fraser, the Home & Family executive producer, to create a ‘vulgar, demeaning and hostile work environment, especially for women.’ He also accuses Fraser of ‘running a fear-based operation’ in which he regularly ‘bullied, verbally abused and harassed cast and crew members.'”

No, Mr. Buruma, it wasn’t that you “blew up” on Twitter when angry readers of your New York Times Review of Books found an essay by an accused – though acquitted – sexual abuser headlining the magazine. It wasn’t even your flippant interview with Slate that sealed your fate. It was the lack of editing. “Accuracy aside, the piece Buruma found so ‘interesting’ is, actually, unbearably trite. As a literary personal essay, it is a failure, written in abstract and bland language, drowning under the weight of vague therapeutic bromides.”

New buildings including Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, for example, incorporate hotels, event spaces, and other uses, a reflection of the fact that arts infrastructure “has come to play an important part in the experiential economy.”

The volunteer-run museum in the city of Yoshar-Ola (roughly 100 miles from Kazan) was located in the erstwhile local headquarters — including the torture chamber — of the OGPU, an early Soviet predecessor of the KGB. The founder claims that a new regional governor wants to appease the Kremlin; a group of Russian museum professionals who visited in June argued that the museum needed to be professionalized, with one describing it as “a grandmother’s trunk.”

Given the renewed interest in the ideas and practices of cultural democracy and their potential to address longstanding issues of cultural policy, it seems clear that, as Owen Kelly, a key figure from the community arts movement, has recently argued, arguments about cultural democracy still resonate. But for Arts Council England, they are not unproblematic.

Profound demographic shifts have happened quickly. A place with a 78.6 percent white majority in 1990 has become more than half Hispanic and Asian, according to the 2010 census. But in one highly visible area Orange County still seems mired in the past: arts leadership.

“Local arts groups facing dramatic cuts in their funding levels from the city could get some relief this budget year, and possibly an earlier heads-up in future budget years if their funding allocations appear headed for a decrease. … The cuts were brought about by a combination of more than 100 new applicants for funding, increased administrative costs and lack of reserves that are typically rolled over from the previous budget year.”