Category: issues

“‘The question is,’ Richard Garfield once asked, ‘can systems be dramatic? Can math be breathtaking? Can numbers move your soul?'” In 1991, Garfield (the great-great-grandson of President James Garfield) walked into the offices of a Seattle game publisher with a proposal that ultimately morphed into Magic: The Gathering – the first-ever trading-card game, which, over 25 years, has acquired roughly 20 million players and 20 billion cards printed, some of which are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. Magic, writes Chris Randle, “balances chess’s chilly purity with the social theatre of poker.”

“In Australia,” she told me, “we continue to have the debate about whether putting the majority of our cultural subsidy into the same 30 or so companies for more than 30 years, to produce works for the same audiences, in same venues, often with the same artists, is a good idea. It raises the same level of disbelief as our recent ‘referendum’ on marriage equality or whether the country should boot out Her Maj as our head of state and become a republic.

“Five years ago, I argued that the humanities were still near long-term norms in their number of majors. But since then, I’ve been watching the numbers from the Department of Education, and every year, things look worse. Almost every humanities field has seen a rapid drop in majors: History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak, while the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s.”

“The Walt Disney Company came under heavy fire on Thursday for a decision to walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks for its southern California theme parks, a move critics are characterizing as an extraordinary last-ditch effort to avoid paying a living wage to thousands of workers.”

“Scott Williams is leaving the struggling Newseum after six years — including the past six months as the journalism museum’s president — to lead the Discovery Park of America in Union City, Tenn. Williams is the latest of a string of senior executives to depart the struggling institution that last August began exploring the sale of its Pennsylvania Avenue building or closing entirely.”

Historians are not seers; their analogies may be misplaced and their assessments can be wrong. Yet the idea of history constituting a valuable guide for present and future action was an established part of western culture. This makes sense. In recent decades, however, things have changed. The longstanding view of the historian as being, in modern jargon, ‘policy-relevant’, has fallen out of favour and often arouses suspicion.

For all of its insane growth, creeping capitalism, and occasional insufferability, writes Jillian Steinhauer, the desert festival largely continues to uphold its “‘radically participatory ethic,’ the idea that there are no spectators because everyone can and should be involved in building the contents of Black Rock City.” The problem, when you try to put art from the festival into, say, a Smithsonian museum, is that “casual as they may try to be, art museums are, at the end of the day, uptight. They’re object repositories and arbiters of taste and culture. This makes them an uneasy fit with the rigorous populism of Burning Man, where everyone’s expression of creativity is welcome, no matter how primitive.”

“For many, both locals and would-be visitors, the festivals represent not so much a joyous overabundance of culture as a costly impossibility. … The city comes under huge pressure during August: there are crowded streets, innumerable tour buses, and a city centre that can feel hollowed out by Airbnb lettings and more and more new luxury hotels. … Meantime, the festivals themselves are caught in the curious trap of endless expansionism: the notion that each year’s ought somehow to be bigger than the last, that increased ticket sales and more visitors are necessarily and unquestioningly to be celebrated.”

“The overly complex process leads to mistakes being made by both applicants and by assessors, and refusals being made for visas that could theoretically be granted. The situation has led to artists now telling festivals they are much more reluctant to accept invitations to come to the UK due to the visa process, despite the assistance we receive from bodies such as the British Council and UK embassies across the world.”