Category: issues

“While the ballet, the symphony and the Alley were able to move this season’s performances to other concert halls around town, the Houston Grand Opera had to get more creative. The managing director, Perryn Leech, decided to build an entirely new venue, dubbed the Resilience Theater, inside the cavernous George R. Brown Convention Center. This presented a long list of challenges, including how to pacify season ticket holders (free Lyft rides to and from shows); where to place the orchestra (behind the stage); and how to finesse the acoustics (a work in progress).”

“Just as foreign aid ends up in the pockets of tyrannical kleptocrats rather than reaching the desperate and the starving, so does art aid go to the arts rather than to artists. This is not to suggest that the arts nomenklatura peculates with the licence that politicians enjoy. Nor that it feeds its critics to crocodiles in the time-honoured manner. What it does suggest is that the fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma.”

The founder of Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival resigned from many posts after “Quebec daily Le Devoir on Thursday published women’s accounts of the circumstances in which they allegedly suffered the actions of Mr. Rozon over the last thirty years. Some accuse him of having raped them.”

The stories are consistent, and consistently horrifying: “He prowled the streets of Manhattan looking for attractive young women, usually in their early 20s, sometimes college students, on occasion a high schooler. He approached them in Central Park, standing in line at a bank or drug store or at a copy center while they worked on their resumes.”

A parishioner can flip off a pastor in church, and that’s protected free speech. What if you’re an employee, though? “In bars and parlors across the country, the issue of the flag and the anthem are being aired—and one massive misconception is that, because the players are private employees performing in a private venue, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to their protest.”

When a number of largely white-owned art galleries started opening here over the past few years, a familiar narrative began to emerge: new businesses and more affluent tenants moved in, followed by rent rises that forced out longtime residents. But while many young activists in Boyle Heights have loudly and aggressively protested the art galleries, Guadalupe Rosales – a successful artist and Boyle Heights native committed to preserving the history of her neighbourhood – doesn’t find the issues around gentrification to be quite so cut and dry.

Russian actress Lyubov Tolkalina said in an interview, “Isn’t it beautiful when a man of such great power sexually harasses you? … What does it matter how you got the part? It’s good for everyone: he feels good, they feel good, and most importantly the viewers feel good.”

“Most obviously, the city’s financial woes were so calamitous that, funders, most of whom already had extensive footprints in the city, had no choice but to respond en masse. Samuel Johnson’s old adage applies here: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ That being said, there’s far more to Philadelphia’s success than the threat of (figurative) imminent hanging.”

“Just seven years ago, the school, founded in 1964, was $2 million in debt and temporarily closed. Today, the school has not only recovered, but is pivoting from a place that primarily provided arts education for children to a full-fledged performing arts center.”

I think these creative endeavors resonate with people because they are grounded in each participant’s lived experience (rather than universal plots or a reflection of someone else’s perspective) and, as such, they cannot help but be authentic. Perhaps what we call “bad” or “amateur” art isn’t because of “aesthetics,” but because it feels derivative of some form that already exists rather than growing from this place of fearless, individual experience. But how then do we nurture this creative authenticity?