Category: issues

Josephine Ridge was only in the job for two years. She has previously served as artistic director of the Melbourne Festival and as executive director of the Sydney Festival for nearly a decade.

Since 1985, arts figures including Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Capra and Ella Fitzgerald have received the National Medal of Arts while similar cultural achievement has been recognized by the National Humanities Medal, which presidents have awarded to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Anna Deavere Smith and Louise Glück. But neither of those medals has been awarded since President Trump took office, the longest gap ever and one that again draws attention to the president’s often awkward relationship with the arts.

Edinburgh’s flagship festivals contributed £14.4m to the Scottish culture sector in 2016/17, according to new research that examines the events’ local impact for the first time. The festivals, which celebrated their 70th anniversary last year, were also credited with creating a “halo effect” that enhances the reputation of Scotland’s cultural activity, and generating international opportunities for its creatives.

A new exhibition in Hamburg by curator Roger M. Buergel (still known for his provocative Documenta 12 in 2007) “delivers on its contention that European museums need to do much more than just restitute plundered objects in their collections, important as that is. A 21st-century universal museum has to unsettle the very labels that the age of imperialism bequeathed to us: nations and races, East and West, art and craft.”

Mike Scutari interviews Kate D. Levin, who was also New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner for the 12 years Michael Bloomberg was mayor, about the “virtuous cycle that public art tends to trigger” and how government and non-governmental leaders in cities are coming to understand “the creative sector’s ability to address pressing civic issues.”

“The New South Wales state government is pushing ahead with a controversial plan to relocate the Powerhouse Museum — part of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences — from central Sydney to a western suburb, despite widespread criticism and an ongoing parliamentary inquiry. At a cost of A$1.2bn ($890m), … [the project] means demolishing the museum, which opened in 1988 in Ultimo, central Sydney, and seven historic buildings in Parramatta, 23km to the west, to make way for a new museum due to open in 2023.”

The 900-seat theatre/concert hall at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (referred to with the Arabic name Ithraa) in Dhahran opened in June with two concerts by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra to celebrate the holiday Eid al-Fitr. Ithraa, designed by the architecture firm Snøhetta and funded by the oil company Saudi Aramco, says it will present a year-round program of performances from around the world as well as music and drama by Saudi and other Arab artists.

In an Accra neighborhood, a monthly parade of men in drag carrying big yellow plastic jugs, which the organizer uses to make public art in a style he calls “Afrogallonism.” An artist covering himself in blue or gold paint and slow-walking through the streets of Jamestown. Immersive installations in an old train shed and car showroom in Kumasi. Covering Accra billboards in secondhand clothing and the National Theatre in jute sacks. Billie A. McTernan writes about these and other projects to bring the arts directly to regular people in the West African country.

“‘Every few weeks I do a search on Twitter and there is an incredible benevolence about the Habsburgs,’ says Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican and the former ruling family’s unofficial social-media maven. ‘There is definitely renewed interest.’ The reasons for this burst of enthusiasm are nuanced, even contradictory. This year’s centennial of the end of the first world war, and of the empire’s collapse, is part of the explanation. So is a sense that the anxieties of the late imperial period, years of disorienting change in politics and society, overlap with today’s.”