Category: issues

“The museum’s financial woes, including lackluster fundraising and the weight of its primary benefactor’s $300 million debt burden, have long prompted speculation that it would be forced to leave its grand location on Pennsylvania Avenue, just blocks from the Capitol, or close altogether.”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the hippest of New York’s major performing arts venues, has chosen David Binder, a theater and arts festival producer best known for shepherding Hedwig and the Angry Inch from its nightclub origins all the way through its Tony-winning Broadway run. Binder replaces Joseph Melillo, who worked at BAM for 35 years and helped make it into the major institution it has become.

Despite broad consensus among professors that their job isn’t for slackers, they tend to disagree, primarily among themselves, about exactly how hard they work. While some scholars say they maintain a traditional 40-hour workweek, others contend they have a superhuman workload.

“Titled ‘Prelude to the Shed’, the free event” – a 12-day festival this May – “will include a mix of art, dance and live music performances, including a work by the artist Tino Sehgal. plus talks and an experimental school. The events will all be housed in a temporary structure at 10th Avenue and 30th Street, a block away from The Shed’s $500m home at the centre of the Hudson Yards development.”

Creative Scotland “has raided £2.6 million from other budgets to pay for the climbdown, which has been announced in the wake of widespread criticism online and an intervention from the Scottish Government.” Two of the five groups whose funding was restored after the outcry are children’s theatre companies; two more work with disabled artists; the fifth, the Dunedin Consort, has racked up many international awards for its recordings of Bach and Handel vocal works. Still among the zeroed-out is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Describing the funder as “a family at war with many of those it seeks to serve,” Ruth Wishart, who joined the inaugural board over seven years ago, said board members had not been given sufficient time to make decisions and that she no longer wanted to back the funder’s “flawed” choices.

The study of around 430,000 people aged between 38 and 73 and living in 22 UK cities found significant associations between the increased walkability of a neighbourhood, lower blood pressure and reduced hypertension risk among its residents.

With rents having risen by 70% or more this decade, “San Francisco’s city government has launched an online census in an effort to find out how many artists and arts professionals have left the city.”

“The arts could become invisible everywhere except arts organisations if they don’t make themselves more relevant and more job-focused in schools. We need the whole arts sector to engage with education. If we stay in the bubble surrounding the arts, we get marginalised.”