Category: issues

“A new economic prosperity impact report, organised by the non-profit organisation Americans for the Arts, reveals that San Francisco’s arts and culture sector annually brings in $1.45 billion and supports over 39,000 full-time jobs. According to the report, the City by the Bay accounts for nearly 1% of the $166.3 billion generated by the sector nationwide.”

Yes, there are gentrification worries, but “these businesses and others are ambassadors of Bronx culture at large, said Jerome LaMaar, [boutique] 9J’s dapper owner. ‘And what’s a brand without the right ambassador to push it?’ Here, a look at some of those South Bronx ambassadors and their pioneering efforts in this new frontier.”

“Our statuary is largely derived from and better suited to authoritarian societies than democratic ones because monuments require assent to a common proposition: This man was great. They are meant to put historical truths into final form, beyond debate, literally etched in stone.”

“Edwin Torres has a strong and diverse history in arts philanthropy. Prior to joining the NYC Cultural Affairs office, he was an associate director with The Rockefeller Foundation and director of external partnerships for Parsons School of Design at The New School. He served on the GIA board of directors from 2011 through 2016. He has also served on the arts and culture team at Ford Foundation as well as on the staff of Bronx Council on the Arts. He holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Management from The New School.”

“Next month, … educator, activist, and ballplayer Octavius V. Catto will be honored by the city where he was murdered with a full-blown sculptural commemoration in bronze and granite on the southern apron of City Hall. Amazing to say, Catto will then become the first named African-American to be memorialized on public land in [Philadelphia’s] history.”

Dominic Dromgoole, who spent a decade as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe and oversaw that company’s worldwide tour of Hamlet: “Institutionally I think we have a problem that we have possibly over-stacked our governance areas with people from the world of … accountancy. They are entirely honourable and entirely nice people, but I think from the moment they begin working on things they’re always overly calculating risk and overly worried about danger. Their inclination is to say no to any venture that they can’t absolutely 100 per cent future-proof, … so that now you have an element of fear within a lot of organisations that doesn’t need to be there.”

The century-old Merriam Theater, which the Kimmel Center acquired last fall, has a handsome old interior – as well as painfully cramped seats (which some patrons have to walk through offices to reach), poor acoustics, outdated sound and light equipment, and dressing rooms that literally used to be stables. The new plan is for the Kimmel to partner with a developer to tear down the seven-story building currently housing the Merriam and completely revamp the place (saving the auditorium’s architectural details) while building a skyscraper above it.

‘Acting Up’, commissioned by Shadow Culture Minister Tom Watson, notes that although 33% of the population is working class, just 16% of actors are working class, and only 7% of the performing arts workforce is from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background. The report presents the findings of an inquiry that focused on the barriers to working in the performing arts at every career stage, in order to find “political solutions to knock them down”.

Statues have symbolic power. “The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases — these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.”

“As Citizen Ticket’s technology – BitTicket – is based on blockchain, it means that batches cannot be oversold and tickets cannot be copied or counterfeited, while the number of tickets in a transaction is also monitored.”