Category: issues

Scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp are the founders of MICRO, which creates six-foot-tall pop-up museum kiosks that can be installed in hotel lobbies, transit stations, office buildings – even DMVs and post offices.

In a speech on Tuesday, Jo Johnson, the universities minister, said that universities “should be places that open minds not close them, where ideas can be freely challenged and prejudices exposed. But in universities in America and increasingly in the United Kingdom, there are countervailing forces of censorship, where groups have sought to stifle those who do not agree with them in every way under the banner of ‘safe spaces’ or ‘no-platforming.’ However well-intentioned, the proliferation of such safe spaces, the rise of no-platforming, the removal of ‘offensive’ books from libraries and the drawing up of ever more extensive lists of banned ‘trigger’ words are undermining the principle of free speech in our universities.”

Most of us believe we’re working smarter not harder. The fact is though, we’re caught in scarcity’s flywheel and it’s cascading a fire fighting, scarcity mindset throughout our organizations, magnifying the problem as things become worse for everyone. We’ll never “catch up.” Worst of all, we’re often oblivious to what will help us out of the bind as we focus on the fires, or assume if we just score that big grant — come onnnnn, lucky major foundation grant! — or sell out our season, we’ll finally be able to get ahead.

“Here’s a selective, not-so-nostalgic look back at some of the fiercest fights from a year when just about every cultural event and artifact became an arena for asking not just ‘Which side are you on?’ but ‘Do you really have my back?'”

For a start, unlike the battles over the “NEA Four” and Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (the one that incorporated elephant dung), the censoring impulse this time is coming from the left at least as much as the right (as with Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till). However, argues Isaac Kaplan, the key difference between then and now isn’t the political identification of those objecting to the art – it’s how much actual power they have.

“Lincoln Center was the crown-jewel project of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, which was overseen by Robert Moses, the man who reshaped the city in the mid-20th century.” As Robert Caro wrote, “Moses was not making even a pretense of creating new homes for the [7,000-plus] families displaced.”

Intuitively, most of us arts types sense (or at least want to believe) that the answer is yes. Now the Mellon Foundation is funding a study to get real data to back up that answer (or not).

“Blithe celebrations of a national birthday in the art world turned into a fury of self-critique, a rupture in the status quo through which all manner of marginal histories came flooding. Indigenous art in particular came to dominate the scene with major institutions nationwide joining an earnest, long-overdue effort to acknowledge not only its remarkable breadth and power, but the ugly, long-waged, government-sponsored effort to erase it from our national life.”

Commenting primarily on the structure of the sector and noting that 6.7% of the workforce in 2016 were EU nationals and there were 2 million jobs in the creative industries, the publication has been met with scorn from the arts sector for glossing over issues such as freedom of movement and refusing to include ‘sector views’. The Committee received these from the Government but “decided not to publish”.