Category: issues

Among the facilities listed in the proposal, for an area that stretches from Greenwich and Canary Wharf in London out to the North Sea coast, are a sculpture foundry, theatre rehearsal studios, a centre for video game development, two film studios, an expanded Turner Contemporary gallery, and Britain’s largest 3D-printing facility.

“Arts Council England’s Catalyst funding programme has ‘paid dividends’ in contributing to ‘real change’ related to fundraising, the final report into the programme has concluded. The three-year, £70m scheme, which ended in 2015, helped arts organisations to increase their fundraising capacity through awards and match funding.”

“We might note that the conditions ravaging our profession are also ravaging our work. The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist.”

“Today’s leading artists focus almost singlemindedly on issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Beauty and truth are not merely subservient to the “identitarian” agenda, they are excised from the conversation altogether. It’s not just that the New Philistines have weaponized art in the service of an aggressive social-engineering campaign; they’ve pulverized it.”

“The O and EB1 visas are what many consider America’s secret weapon. ‘It is how the US has been stealing the best of the best from other nations for years,’ Mazaheri believes.”

He saved the best of his show for the last five minutes, where he announced he was buying time for folksy commercials that would impart facts during morning news shows. “It was one small, hilarious counterattack in a landscape that, for liberal-leaning comedians and their fans, has seemed pretty bleak lately.”

As the BAFTAs roll out Sunday night, actors grapple with the fact that their industry has become more exclusive. “‘It’s not enough being talented – these days you need cash,’ said Steve Coogan, who went to drama school thanks largely to a state grant. The absence of public support, Coogan believes, means that it is now only ‘privileged actors who, as well as being talented, can go to drama school because they have family money to provide the cushion for them.'”

“Radical empathy, as I define it, is the act of reaching out with an open heart and mind, even if we feel the person or community we are reaching out to is undeserving of such openness. It’s the notion that, if we swallow our own hurt long enough to extend empathy to our opposition no matter what (that’s the radical part), we will establish connections capable of yielding far greater fruit than any amount of soap-boxing or condemnation ever will. Radical empathy is how the artist and arts institutions will foster communication and connection across communities. Radical empathy is the artist’s new job.”

“You couldn’t have designed better fodder for a meme had you tried.” Megan Garber writes about how and why Mitch McConnell’s now-notorious mansplain about Elizabeth Warren became the feminist slogan tweeted ’round the world.

Leon Botstein: “The presidents of our colleges and universities must defend the principles that have enabled institutions of higher education to flourish. These are freedom and tolerance, and openness to individuals no matter their national origin or religion. The actions and spirit of the new administration threaten the American university’s core values.”