Category: issues

It reports that, while moderate inebriation doesn’t boost your ability to generate innovative ideas, it can help you avoid one major barrier to creative breakthroughs: getting stuck in a mental rut.

It is this notion of competition that has preoccupied the case for the arts for much of the past ten years, leading to a greater focus on impact and evidence of outcomes than ever before. And while the resulting improvements in measurement and evaluation are in many regards enhancing the offer the sector makes, it is an argument we can never win and which in fact misses the point.

The six, including former President Park Geun-hye’s chief of staff and culture minister, were convicted of perjury, abuse of power, and related charges for having drawn up a list of cultural figures and denied them state funding and access to programs because they were seen as political opponents of Park.

“After Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and London’s Tate Modern, the trend for converting industrial buildings into contemporary art spaces looks set to continue in the northern Italian city of Turin. The Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), an H-shaped complex of 19th-century railway repair workshops covering an area of 35,000 sq. m, is due to reopen as a privately funded ‘arts and innovation centre’ on 30 September with a trio of site-specific artists’ commissions and two weeks of free concerts.”

“For a very long time, the criteria for excellence in the arts have been owned by a particular body of experts who generally have a condescending view of the quality of art developed in community-based and social change programs and projects. These credentialed “experts” hold to a definition of quality largely based in an “art for art’s sake” paradigm. However, this definition loses the connection with the vast majority of people who live in the country, as well as the vast range of arts that is produced here and the range of reasons for which people make art. Art is for many sakes, including but not limited to art’s sake (whatever that restriction means in practice).”

Derek Thompson: “Altogether, the numbers paint a clear picture: The higher-education market is not bursting, like a popped soap bubble; but it is leaking, like a pierced balloon. What’s going on? The explanation is a little bit of weak demand, a little bit of over-supply, a big crackdown on for-profit colleges, and, perhaps, a subtle shift in culture.”

“More than 72 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the first traveling exhibition about the Nazi death camp will begin a journey later this year to 14 cities across Europe and North America, taking heartbreaking artifacts to multitudes who have never seen such horror up close.”

“Nonprofits with large endowments are collecting more than twice as much money as they are spending on grants, facilities, and administrative and other costs, a new data analysis of 1,600 organizations by The Chronicle shows.”