Category: issues

In a single stroke, the state government proclaimed its intent to both interrupt the cohesive design vision of Federation Square and undermine the civic mission that made it central to Melbourne. The proposal raises a question for this city, and for many other cities as well: Can anybody stop the relentless push to corporatize public space?

“In a show that aired on New Year’s Eve, the Japanese comedian Masatoshi Hamada appeared in a Detroit Lions football jacket, a curly wig and dark makeup, an attempt at imitating the actor Eddie Murphy’s character from the 1984 movie Beverly Hills Cop.” The initial social media reaction, started (in English and Japanese) by a bilingual African-American columnist in Japan, was #StopBlackfaceJapan. But some local fans insist that the practice doesn’t and shouldn’t have stigma attached to it there.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is well known for his description of known knowns, the “things we know we know,” and the unknown unknowns, “the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” This second part is the realm of science. Exploring, searching, finding. But, as we saw numerous times in 2017, today we struggle to keep the catalogue of what we do know.

“In recent years the Chinese government has stepped up its crackdown on domestic dissent at the same time it continues to expand the country’s global influence. A confluence of events has China studies scholars raising concerns about whether the Chinese Communist Party is exporting its censorship regime abroad, and what the implications are for free discussion and research at universities outside China.”

“Unlike curating, the changing role of the producer seems less motivated by theory than by external pressures – namely, an increasingly competitive, capitalist working culture.”

The downturn follows a decade of explosive growth in foreign student enrollment, which now tops 1 million at United States colleges and educational training programs, and supplies $39 billion in revenue. Schools in the Midwest have been particularly hard hit — many of them non-flagship public universities that had come to rely heavily on tuition from foreign students, who generally pay more than in-state students.

Odds it will happen?  Given our history of willingness to be political animals, the odds are about zero the field will see its own self interest as a legitimate cause.

“The real intellectual crisis on campus is not threats to free speech, but threats to the quality of speech. Like much of the media, colleges have capitulated to a Trumpian version of debate that treats lying, demagoguery, bluster, mockery, and bad faith as equally valid approaches to ideological argumentation. This approach subordinates the pursuit of truth to a pernicious “both sides” logic that treats all statements as equal simply because they’re politically divergent, even if they’re radically different in merit.”

The L.A. Times’ Christopher Knight worked hard to convince the Border Patrol that he should be able to see the wall prototypes – and that an architecture critic’s experience and expertise were relevant. But once he got there, he says, “my critical instincts seemed divided against themselves. The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one.”

Karen Brooks Hopkins, longtime president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM): “As fundraisers, we are constantly told to look at the bright side: If at first you don’t succeed; smile though your heart is breaking, etc. But as a former president and chief fundraiser for a large multidisciplinary arts organization, I have decided, in the spirit of the season, to present my ‘bottom 10 list’ delineating the worst, most excruciating parts of the job.”