Category: issues

“This is not merely an idle philosophical debate. Every year, our society invests thousands of hours and millions of dollars in generating knowledge about arts and culture.1 But just when choices about how to distribute resources seem to matter more than at any time in living memory, the arts field’s system for knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption is under tremendous strain, if not entirely broken — a predicament only exacerbated by a rapidly changing media environment.”

Concerns about hearing loss largely focus on excessive noise exposure. But environmental noise is just as unsafe. People living in cities are regularly exposed (against their will) to noise above 85 decibels from sources like traffic, subways, industrial activity, and airports. That’s enough to cause significant hearing loss over time. If you have an hour-long commute at such sound levels, your hearing has probably already been affected. Urban life also sustains average background noise levels of 60 decibels, which is loud enough to raise one’s blood pressure and heart rate, and cause stress, loss of concentration, and loss of sleep.

Indeed, the entire “marketplace of cuteness”, argues Rebecca Onion, is problematic at best: “the marketplace of cuteness has less interest in age-appropriate gibberish. Instead, it demands that kids fit into an adult’s idea of what’s funny, even as they obviously, being children, are not in on the joke.”

Leslie Jamison visits the one-of-a-kind Zagreb museum and considers the meaning(s) of the institutions and of seven of its objects on display (wall texts included), as well as the Bad Memories Eraser in the gift shop.

Canadian cultural organizations are experiencing a leadership deficit and the problem is worsening as more and more highly regarded chief executive officers announce their retirement. We are seeing a generational change in leadership. Coming retirements for 2018 include long-standing CEOs Peter Herrndorf of the National Arts Centre and Piers Handling of TIFF.

“If there is a population shift away from cities towards less developed suburban and rural areas, there may need to be a shift in audience development strategies.  Fewer people who can easily commute to a performance or exhibition, will necessitate the need for finding new ways to attract and entice both those possibly smaller subsets remaining in a defined area, and those growing cohorts no longer in the area.  We have already witnessed the negative effects of intolerable commute situation on the willingness of some consumers to brave the traffic to attend events even relatively near their homes or workplaces.”

Psychiatrist Allen Frances, author of Twilight of American Sanity: “There is no Pablo Escobar Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and no El Chapo Guzman gallery at the Guggenheim. Columbia University doesn’t host a Sinaloa Drug Cartel Center of Developmental Psychobiology. Oxford would no longer be Oxford if its library were named in honor of the Cali drug cartel. … We agree to aggressively prohibit the sale of blood diamonds, but we allow the Sacklers’ clever use of blood money to cloak their drug shame under philanthropic fame.”

“The lawsuit, described by a leading lawyer as a test case [for comedians], relates to a show by Louise Beamont (stage name Reay). Hard Mode was billed as a ‘provocative show [that] explores censorship and surveillance’, though one critic described it as being ‘at its core … about a very recent and raw heartbreak’. Thomas Reay is also suing his wife for breach of privacy and data protection, is seeking £30,000 in damages plus legal costs and wants an injunction to prevent her publishing statements about him, she said.”