Category: issues

Adidas, DeutscheBank, Mars, Cadbury, Lidl and more have pulled ads entirely from YouTube after The Times of London discovered that “the marketers’ ads had run in videos with young girls in underwear, doing the splits, and rolling around in bed — which included sexually inappropriate comments posted by viewers.”

“Wrestling with what to do with the product of tainted executives, artists or news figures is not that far from the eternal issue of how (or even whether) to separate our views of art from our views of the artists. Wagner was blatantly anti-Semitic. Alfred Hitchcock abused actresses who worked for him, so openly that you can see his dysfunctional psychosexual power dynamics right onscreen. Roman Polanski was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old, but does that mean “Rosemary’s Baby” should have been pulled from circulation?”

The Government has been advised to discontinue the selection process for the five bidding cities – Belfast, Dundee, Nottingham, Milton Keynes and Leeds – “immediately”. The DCMS said it is “deeply disappointed” with the decision and is in “urgent discussions” with the European Commission on the matter.

Well, it was hard – possibly worse than anyone had advised.

“The Russian government’s annual St Petersburg International Cultural Forum (16-18 November) set off a new round of debate about the state of artistic freedom in Russia, with officials saying it is flourishing and a model for the world and the liberal intelligentsia saying it is under attack.”

“People who see themselves as chronically denied power appear to have a stronger desire to feel powerful, and are more likely to use sexual aggression toward that end,” writes a research team led by psychologist Melissa Williams of Emory University. “Power can indeed create opportunities for sexual aggression, but it is those who chronically experience low power who will choose to exploit such opportunities.”

Local arts agencies, be they county, city or state need to make a connection with the owners / planners of the smart cities projects, and make the case for their inclusion in the decision making process.  We need to provide strong evidence of our value, and, more than that, make a case with media and the public that no city without an arts component in both the planning and execution is truly “smart” in any sense of the word.

“Organisations often argue they simply can’t afford to pay the living wage, even if they aspire to – and that creating low or no pay opportunities is better than creating none. While this may be a blunt reality for some, we should be under no illusions that this does anything other than exacerbate the sector’s lack of diversity.”

For Andreas Görgen, a global approach to cultural policy has two aims: to promote German culture abroad and to give foreign museums access to the collections and scholarship of German institutions. “We should be willing to free things from the context of our collections and to let other curators look at them and deal with them in their own context, which might give a completely different interpretation,” he says. He is also interested in the potential of digitisation, and how virtual reality can allow objects to be shown without travelling.