Category: issues

A South Korean Actor Has Died After Being Accused Of Sexual Harassment By Drama Students

Jo Min-Ki, a veteran of both stage and screen in Korea, was fired from his teaching role at Cheongju University’s drama department after accusations of rape and harassment. He was found dead just before he was due to be questioned by police. The #MeToo movement is having an impact in South Korea in general: “Jo is one of the a string of high-profile figures to have been accused of sexual misconduct in South Korea in recent weeks.”

ABC Puts An Episode Of ‘Black-ish’ On The Shelf For Being Too Political

The showrunner shot the episode in November, and it was supposed to run in February. Instead, it will never be shown. The episode “features Anthony Anderson’s patriarch Dre caring for his infant son on the night of an intense thunderstorm that keeps the whole household awake. Dre attempts to read the baby a bedtime story, but abandons that plan when the baby continues to cry. He instead improvises a bedtime story that, over the course of the episode, conveys many of Dre’s concerns about the current state of the country.”

Canadian Creative Industries Set New Policies On Harassment

The code, unveiled Thursday by the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), requires all signatories to enact a zero-tolerance policy for harassment, discrimination, bullying and violence. It also requires them to implement consequences for violations, designate people to receive complaints, provide a process for resolution and protect complainants from reprisals.

If We’re In A Golden Age Of Drag, Then Drag Kings Want In

“Largely due to the commercial success of RuPaul’s Logo-turned-VH1 reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag has become perhaps more mainstream and visible than ever. But … drag kings still perform on the fringes of mainstream pop culture. Even though the medium has existed, in different forms, for decades, performances of masculinity aren’t privileged the same way performances of femininity are.” Reporter Hazel Cills meets some of the folks trying to change that.

The Arts Contribute 3/4 Of A Trillion Dollars To The U.S. Economy Each Year: NEA Study

“New data released Tuesday suggest that in a single year, the US arts and culture sector contributed a whopping $763.6 billion to the nation’s economy – more than the entire GDP of Switzerland. That translates into 4.2% of the US economy, suggesting that the arts and culture sector is worth almost as much as the food and agriculture industry (valued at around a trillion dollars a year).”

Have Interest Rate Swaps Trapped Chicago Arts Institutions?

Lyric Opera entered into a swap agreement in 2006 to cover $40 million in bonds. The fixed rate that Lyric’s paying is 3.8 percent, while the variable rate it’s getting in return is now 1.58 percent. Over the 12 years that the swap has existed, Lyric’s paid about $16.8 million for it. During that same period, the cost of interest on the bonds amounted to about $4 million. But Lyric is hardly alone in this. A look at financial statements from a few randomly selected cultural organizations suggests that it’s the rule for our major institutions, not the exception.

Report: Arts Economy In Colorado Now Bigger Than Mining, Agriculture

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts on Tuesday unveiled their most recent analysis of the economic impact of arts and culture in the U.S. In 2015, the year with the most recent reporting data, goods and services generated by museums, architecture firms, artists and other artistically inclined businesses and agencies accounted for 4.3 percent of the Colorado’s GDP, the feds say. It was part of $763.6 billion arts and culture contributed to the U.S. economy as a whole that year, 4.2 percent of GDP and more than mainstay industries like agriculture and transportation. Creative industries accounted for a $20 billion trade surplus that year, according to the analysis.