Category: issues

Time’s just about up for dude-focused statuary: “In the United States, there are about 5,200 public statues depicting historical figures, according to The Smithsonian’s Art Inventories Catalog. Very few of those — fewer than 400, according to one account in The Washington Post — are of women.”

The union, which represents more than 160,000 actors and many others involved in TV and movies, has a president who has been pushing for this and a lot of other reforms since the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s harassment and abuse came out last October. One SAG-AFTRA official: “This past year has been a reckoning for sexual harassment abuses in our industry. … No SAG-AFTRA performer should ever feel alone or without recourse when it comes to sexual harassment or assault.”

“Gov. Charlie Baker last week vetoed the addition of the $2 million in funding for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the umbrella organization that distributes arts funding. This week … the Massachusetts Legislature overrode the governor’s veto, increasing the budget for the umbrella organization from $14.1 million to $16.1 million. It’s the first increase in four years.”

In the guise of apologizing for his “extraordinary Offense,” Franklin set out principles of publishing that prefigure some of the arguments made by Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, in his defense of the technology company as a neutral platform, meaning it simply presents the views of others, rather than authenticating them or arbitrating among their competing claims.

What the artist and her team found was that, whatever their party leanings, nearly half of all the board members they researched had made political contributions of more than $200—the point at which they must be reported to the FEC—versus 0.68% of the US adult population that did the same. More than a quarter (28.5%) of the board members gave more than $2,700, as opposed to 0.1% of the larger population.

“Is there a way to explain what’s happening to us? Is there a theory, a secret, or a person capable of forcing our undulating reality to come into focus? Is there a way to feel stable on this careening ship of a country? But of course there is: two compelling options have emerged into the mainstream in the last few weeks … One is brought to us by Sacha Baron Cohen, the other by a person, or persons, known as Q. One claims to show that the people in charge are actually idiots; the other claims to know that the idiot-in-chief is actually in charge.”

F. Javier Torres and Leila Tamari, who ran ArtPlace America’s National Creative Placemaking Fund: “[We] wondered to ourselves, well, what does love look like in grantmaking? We think it begins by remembering that behind each proposal, set of guidelines and evaluation criteria is a human being — the people who do the work. And, to incorporate love, you need to find ways to share power, be transparent, and prioritize relationships. In some cases, we succeeded, and in others, we missed the target completely.”

In its fundamentals, the idea is that the QAnon conspiracy seems suspiciously similar to the plot of Q, a best-selling novel by a team of anarchist media activists collectively known as “Luther Blissett,” first published in Italian in 1999. The suggestion, evidently, originates with Twitter posts by the “Wu Ming Foundation,” the name of a present-day literary collective formed by former Luther Blissett members

International tourism has more than quadrupled since 1980, with growth in the last decade in particular being fueled by China’s mushrooming middle class. Now destination cities from Venice to Barcelona to Amsterdam to Auckland are seeing resistance from residents who feel their hometowns are being overrun. Richard Florida looks at the problems heavy tourism brings and possible ways to address them.