Category: issues

“While most community arts programs for underserved youth were planned by caring, well-intentioned organizers, they are doing serious harm. They are designed to mitigate risk — to treat participants not as creative talent full of ideas and possibility, but as disadvantaged youth or, worse, cautionary tales in the making. Their target outcomes are preventing violence or pregnancy, lowering obesity rates or other deficits attached to their community’s identity — not to prepare our country for a future of innovation and economic participation. This must change.”

1967 “was a year in which most Canadians felt good about themselves and their country.” A principal reason was Expo, which attracted more than 50 million people and was described by the respected Canadian writer Peter C. Newman as “the greatest thing we have ever done as a nation.”

“The protests started almost immediately after the presidential election. … And it hasn’t let up. Each Trump proclamation has seemed to inspire a new round of agitation and action. … Whether this ideological high alert will produce good art is one question; whether the art will do any good is another.” Carl Swanson explores the battle lines.

Rachel Corbett of New York magazine asked 22 artists, curators, and critics what works of political art they found genuinely powerful. Here’s a slideshow gallery with their answers (with which one may or may not agree).

The primary concern of contemporary criticism is not whether a given cultural object is good or bad, but how that object reflects the realities of the social world, and how it can potentially (re)shape that same world. For Weinmann, “this new turn of criticism, this emphasis on the politics behind art, may be better for a work’s reputation than criticism that ignores politics.”

“If I understand [Richard] Florida, he’s arguing that today’s troubles are a consequence of the success of a few cities such as Seattle, and especially New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. And they are also victims because of affordability. As Florida correctly puts it, these cities have ‘wildly disproportionate shares’ of advanced industries, startups and talent. But what really caused this?”

Actors who have spent considerable time accusing SAG-AFTRA officials of lining their own pockets do it again, and then add a laundry list of accusations: “Complaints about residuals and foreign royalties trust funds, alleged conflict of interest and such matters as reimbursement of automobile mileage expenses for union travel, frequent flyer mile usage, cellphone plans, ownership of union buildings, the conduct of an independent music royalties organization (SoundExchange), the union’s recent deal with startup Exactuals for residuals direct deposit, reimbursement of bar association dues for the union’s general counsel, attendance at conferences by union executives, the hiring of a top expert on royalties and the fact that union executive director David White is no longer on active status as a member of the California bar (which is only required for practicing lawyers).”

Copeland: “Knowing you have a bigger purpose — that it’s more than just about you on that stage, it’s all the dancers who came before and the ones who’ll come later — it makes the struggle much easier to deal with.”

“As an arts festival with an explicit social change mission, Refugee Week faces some unique challenges. Emily Churchill Zaraa discusses how it tackles them head on.”