Category: issues

The reality that has gotten lost in the impassioned debate over who gets to go to college, which often focuses on racial and ethnic minorities and students from low-income families is: The high school graduates who head off to campus in the lowest proportions in America are the ones from rural places.

She has said she was attacked, and threatened, by James Toback, and she wasn’t really planning to come forward. “I was the only one who was somewhat known, so I thought this is all gonna be on me, this lawsuit. I won’t be able to put my kid through school. Then it turned out there were 38 other women accusing him, and he called them cunts and cocksuckers and liars, so I thought, OK, I’ll lose everything, I’ll go to court. I will be on the right side of history. Now he’s up to 396 women, and I’m sure there are thousands.”

Philip Kennicott: “One fundamental strategy of political art is to say: This ugly image is who we are, and then challenge the audience to deny that, in word and deed. By forcing us to confront the great fetish of American culture, its slavish worship of the gun, the Hirshhorn could dramatize a choice we face, and a decision we have avoided for generations now. There has never been a more urgent moment to project that challenge at Americans, and hope they finally are sickened by the idea.”

The push to build a performing arts component at the World Trade Center site has had more reversals of fortune than a Greek drama. But the project took several steps forward this week with approval of an agreement for a 99-year lease; an announcement that nearly $300 million had been raised and the naming, Friday, of its first artistic director: Bill Rauch, who leads the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Howard Sherman: “It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.”

“According to Bloomberg’s math, the four winning projects based in Los Angeles; Gary, Indiana; Spartanburg, South Carolina; and a triumvirate of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy in New York generated $13 million for those four places, both in terms of new jobs, related neighborhood investments, and visitor spending. More than 10 million people are estimated to have viewed those works, which not so subtly encouraged water conservation, culinary job training, better-lit public spaces, and improvement to blighted buildings, respectively.”

University tuition fees are a prime example. Public transport run for profit by private-sector franchisees is another. Sooner or later, central government’s what-next-to-privatise spotlight was bound to turn to the Arts Council. Unthinkable? Ask any client of the Student Loan Company. Ask anyone who commutes to work by train, paying the highest fares in Europe. Ask English Heritage (once the Ministry of Works) or the Canal and Rivers Trust (formerly British Waterways).

“There have been really good articles showing that if you take a white man that’s in prison for, say, stealing from a store,” the philanthropist tells a reporter, “and he has the same record, the same number of years incarcerated, the same good behaviour as a black man that’s done the exact same thing, the white person gets paroled sooner.”

“Some criticized the change as an erasure of the organization’s history. Others took issue with the choice of a generic-sounding name over one reflecting the origins of PS122, which was founded in 1980 when a group of artists took over an abandoned public school.” (One waggish critic tweeted, “In honor of PS122’s decision to rebrand as Performance Space New York, I am considering changing my name to Personal Name.”) “The initial outcry has subsided, but … questions linger about the new identity. To what extent does a name matter? What happens to the history it holds? “