Category: issues

The researchers found that the skills required fall into five clusters, only two of which are self-evidently “creative.” The other three “are not inherently creative and [are] therefore at risk of being overlooked, but … are essential to enabling the creative process.”

Among the candidates to succeed Irina Bokova this November is former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay, the only one of nine who’s from Europe or North America. Three of the candidates are women, and four are from the Arab world.

“No critic can know what another diner brings to the table or an audience member to a concert hall, what vicarious joy—or scorn—a reader draws from a review. Which is why I object to one of Pete Wells’s most ringing self-justifications for taking a pass on this particular restaurant: that the people who eat there are the wrong sort.”

Alyssa Rosenberg: “The killers who carry out such acts of terrorism aren’t simply launching assaults on Western culture. They’re attempting to destroy the particular freedom that comes from surrendering to art, exploiting the very vulnerability that accompanies that surrender.”

There’s a clear pattern in which metro areas are becoming more urban: Dense metros are getting denser. Meanwhile, sprawling metro areas are spreading out further. It’s another example of a polarized America, of places becoming more unlike each other: not only with respect to income inequality and politics, but also with growth patterns.

Beginning two years ago, not long after a new executive director arrived, staffers and some board members at the Glenwood Springs Center for the Arts began discovering serious financial shenanigans: multiple bank accounts, paid-for items that had never been ordered or delivered, paychecks bouncing. The executive director kept saying things were under control; city officials, repeatedly warned, insisted they could do nothing. Now the exec is gone, the Center is broke and may close, and the police are involved. How did it get to this point? Ryan Summerlin reports.

“Technological change, along with its radical re-structuring of the American economy, is decimating the business of culture and throttling artists, particularly those just starting out. Jonathan Taplin’s excellent new volume Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy explores the ways that the mind-boggling concentration of power in the hands of internet monopolies is widening the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, especially those in the arts. The major players (stars, etc) benefit from centralized control of eyeballs. The big names are raking in bigger bucks than before, while those lower down on the food chain — artists and groups who decades ago were able to make a middle class living through their efforts — are getting less and less.”

“The evolution of ticketing systems and related analytical tools provides a tremendous opportunity for facilities to support artists. Facilities can provide subsidized access to these systems and additional modules that producing organizations can use to advance audience development and fundraising efforts on their own.”