Category: issues

Some powerful (mostly male) voices in the music industry said the guidelines, originally meant to apply to R. Kelly and XXXTentacion, were unclear and would amount to censorship. But the leader of a women’s advocacy group said, “Women weren’t asking Spotify to play judge and jury. … We were just asking the company to stop promoting artists that have a documented history of physical and sexual abuse.”

“How to respond to budget cuts in an unstable economic environment is perhaps the number one struggle. Managing cultural organisations in a sustainable way is not straightforward these days and perhaps it never has been. What has changed is that we are facing the vulnerability of public investment, in parallel with a significant shrinking of private investment. Add to that the extent to which digitisation has affected the creative value chain, from conception to creation, the arts sector is faced with quite a new panorama. And this requires new approaches to the way we work.”

“The 1960s marked a coming together of politics and counterculture, reminiscent of earlier modernist movements like dada and fluxus, though on a much larger scale. The hippies and their offshoot groups, more than any other anti-establishment group at the time, integrated art and life in a way in which the two were indistinguishable – an idea that carries through to contemporary art today.”

The criticism levied at hip-hop from the right is a pointed indictment of black culture: Black people lost their way and this crude music was the culprit. It’s understandably popular because it feeds into the “pick yourselves up” rhetoric that downplays the oppression of black people while justifying it.

The great pyramids are surrounded by city. The Mona Lisa is thronged with crowds. The Leaning Tower and Stone Henge are underwhelming in person…

Burckhardt invented culture as we know it – not just the official “arts”, but any human activity that has symbolic meaning. Newspapers and their websites are still behind Burckhardt on this. Looking for articles about fashion and food? You’ll find them in “lifestyle”. Burckhardt saw these too as culture. Of course, so do we – it would just get hard to organise stuff if it was all classed in one big mix. But everyone knows today that clothes are significant cultural creations and that cooking is about meaning as much as flavour. The amazing thing is how clearly Burckhardt saw it 1860.

While arts writing is going through one of its richest periods of innovation, with an explosion of forms in recent years, much of the experimentation is happening well outside of traditional media. The internet seems to have reminded at least some writers of the kind of artistry that’s possible in art criticism, says Charlotte Frost, author of a forthcoming book, “Art Criticism Online: A History.” This represents a return to the roots of the field, she adds. The 800-word art review is actually a fairly recent invention. But if you turn the clock back a bit, to the 18th-century Paris salons, for instance, there were all kinds of critical responses to art, Frost says.

“A dedicated group of snowbirds invested in some cultural enrichment for the city in the 1980s, marking a wave of new institutions that began to pop up in Miami.” Now, a dozen years after the 2006 opening of what is now the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts (and its rescue from disaster by Arsht two years later), “there is more diversity across Miami’s nonprofit disciplines than ever.”

“Personal politics aside, there are practical reasons why people in the arts are worried that Brexit will be bad news – including their concerns about free movement of talent, funding and Britain’s reputation around the world. But others are seeing silver linings. Here are some of the ways Brexit could affect the UK’s creative industries and talent.”

What does the Shed’s sliding roof get you that the sliding wooden panels don’t? The answer: It gets you bang for your half billion bucks. The Shed wants to be grand. The Shed wants awe. The Shed wants to look like a spaceport. Even in von Hantelmann’s taxonomy of ritual spaces, we have raced backward rather than forward—not to the theater, not to the museum, but all the way back to the reverence-inducing, hugely capitalized cathedral. A thousand essays on inclusivity won’t change that. They won’t erase the Shed’s position in a development scheme that benefits the wealthy.