Category: issues

“In late June, members of the Council of District Columbia approved a new sales tax to subsidize the arts in D.C.; advocates estimate that the new tax will infuse $30 million dollars per year into the D.C. arts scene.”

Jeremy Wright takes up the position of culture secretary following four years as attorney general, legal adviser to the government. He replaces Hancock, who had been in the position since January this year, and becomes the sixth person to hold the post since 2012, following on from other MPs including Maria Miller and Sajid Javid.

Three dozen people were killed in a December 2016 fire at the warehouse known as the Ghost Ship, which had been illegally occupied as an artists’ colony. Derek Almena, who held the lease to the building, and Max Harris, who assisted Almena as a sort of super, initially pled not guilty but have now pleaded no contest to 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter and are expected to serve several years in prison.

Metro Vancouver, in its way, with its Ferraris and Lamborghinis and its glorious backdrop of the mountains and the sea, is just as much a case study in the dark, broken and ugly side of globalization. At least 20,000 Vancouver homes are empty, and nobody’s really sure who owns them. The rental vacancy rate is less than one per cent. Another 25,000 residences are occupied by homeowners whose declared taxable household incomes are mysteriously lower than the amount they’re shelling out in property taxes, utilities and mortgage payments.

The bottom-up programming means that events are spread across non-traditional sites throughout Friesland – which lacks an extensive network of conventional venues – using a model that seeks out and seeds local producers and companies who then source alternative ways of funding. Of course it wouldn’t be an ECoC without the punctuation of the big international shows, but even these are carefully geared to the local spirit of ‘iepen mienskip’ or open community.

Maybe arts organizations need to grab hold of the “influencer baby” trend on Instagram. (Yes, this does sound eerily like something out of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.) “Influencer marketing has exploded. And more recently, one area has proven to be particularly lucrative: sponsored content that involves kids, or spawn con.”

Newton, star of Westworld, lays it out: “Science fiction is a projection of a time that hasn’t even happened, so if you don’t populate that place with people of different skin tones, shame on you. What it actually is is the reflection of what those makers do in their daily lives, how little they hang out with people of different skin tones. These are the key people and it’s like, ‘Oops-a-daisy, I don’t have a lot of black friends,’ and that’s a reality.”

The largest fall has been in the number of drama teachers, which has dropped by 2,600 (22%), from 11,600 to 9,000. The number of art and design teachers has fallen by 2,100 (15%) from its level of 13,900 in 2011, and there are 1,500 (19%) fewer music teachers.

“The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has asked a senior civil servant to conduct a review of artist residencies funded by the French state, which could lead to the abolition of some culture programmes. … [His] main aim is to make France more attractive ‘to great artistic talents from all over the world’, underlining that the government spends more than €7m annually on around 500 residencies in the fields of visual and performance arts.”