Category: issues

The pitch is that .art instantly creates an identity aligned with the art world; you can see plainly why Apple Inc. rushed to register iphone.art and facetime.art, among 36 domain names. During the preferred access period, which launched in December, more than 2,000 domains were purchased on .art by cultural organizations, as well as tech companies, luxury brands and banks. Instagram.art, Rolex.art and Beyonce.art were all snatched up. Ditto: .art domains for the Louvre, Tate and Centre Pompidou. Mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special .art micro-site.

“It is time for the next wave to roll in at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Joseph V. Melillo, who has helped shape the academy’s cutting-edge aesthetic for more than three decades, will announce on Friday that he plans to step down as executive producer at the end of 2018. Mr. Melillo, 70, is the last link to the organization’s impresario and visionary leader, Harvey Lichtenstein.”

According to the findings, only 59% of people with an Asian background said they had engaged in the arts in the last year compared to 78% from the white and 70% from the black ethnic groups. Over the past 10 years, there has also been a “significant” decline – of seven percentage points – of the proportion of Asian people engaging in the arts.

“Arts Council England (ACE) must operate as a development agency and focus on developing financially sustainable arts organisations, a wide-ranging review by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has concluded. For ACE to fulfil this role, the review presents a series of recommendations …”

The fact that it was promoted primarily to good-looking “influencers” on social media increased its ick factor to the high-minded. It was all brand, no product.

“In the first 24 hours after tickets go on sale, an estimated 20 percent appear on secondary sites. This is often where tickets end up when scalpers and brokers use methods like creating bots to bypass captcha technology and scoop up a large number of tickets, or by creating numerous identities and buying tickets on prepaid credit cards that can be loaded up with cash at a local CVS or Rite Aid to take advantage of paperless ticketing. They make a profit by engaging in price gouging, selling the ticket for much higher than face value, and gaining an upper hand on the real fans.”

Regardless of how much or little he got done in terms of governance in his first 100 days, argues Rosie Gray, “Trump has had a profound effect on an American political culture already heavily weighted toward entertainment. The battles in the White House play out on cable news, the palace intrigue akin to a season of The Real World. Who will win this round – Steve Bannon or Jared Kushner? Gary Cohn or Peter Navarro? Trump himself views the world through the prism of media coverage, is obsessed with cable news, and acts accordingly.”

Despite the decades-long attempts on the right to paint the N.E.A. as rarefied snobbery welching off the state, forty per cent of N.E.A. activity happens in high-poverty areas. Thirty-six per cent of its institutional grants help groups working with disadvantaged populations. And a third of grants serve low-income audiences. The N.E.A. also helps military veterans, a decidedly non-urban élite population. The agency recently added four clinical sites to its existing seven; these sites provide “creative-arts therapies for service members, veterans, and families dealing with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

If you read only one lawsuit today, make it this one. (It’s embedded at the end of this article.) The suit offers a fine retelling of the “cultural moment” formerly known as the Fyre Festival.