“Cultural organizations and artists in our community have cited awareness of their work as one of their top priorities. Having a dedicated arts and culture news desk at WBFO is an excellent way to highlight the depth and breadth of the cultural sector in our region.”
Category: issues
How An Asian-American Director Tried To Save ‘The Mikado’ From Its Own Stereotypes
“As [Kelvin Moon] Loh sees it, the new show preserves the integrity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s composition while stripping away the irrelevant junk that has crept into productions over the years. … There are no taped-back slant eyes or faux-hawkish Samurai hairlines, just stage makeup and severe Victorian middle-parts.” The key device is a newly-created prologue featuring Gilbert, Sullivan, and producer Richard D’Oyly-Carte themselves.
Edinburgh Invests Another £300,000 In Its Festivals
“The extra money will go the Expo fund, which is available to the 12 key Edinburgh festivals to help Scottish artists create and showcase their work on an international stage. It takes the total sum given by the government to support the festivals in 2017/18 to £2.3 million. The cabinet secretary for culture, tourism and external affairs, Fiona Hyslop, noted that the combined festivals attract 4.5 million attendees and contribute £313 million to the Scottish economy.”
Visiting Disney World Is The Modern Version Of Making A Medieval Pilgrimage, Say Academics
And they may just have a point, at least with respect to some visitors. “In the modern world, a trip to Disney has become a rite of passage that transforms those who make the trek … Disney World resembles a medieval pilgrimage center, designed to connect pilgrims with the supernatural.”
Ancient Sites Destroyed In Syria Rise Again, Virtually, In France
A team of archaeologists, architects, and software engineers sent drones around historic buildings and ruins, collecting many thousands of measurements and images so that monuments like Palmyra, if and when they’re destroyed by ISIS, can be recreated in 3D in safer locations.
A Fascinating Debate In Ohio About How To Give Public Money For The Arts
“The idea of public support for the arts, and especially for individual artists, is a pretty progressive idea. It takes some convincing, even in a largely Democratic place. And despite the fact that just last year Cuyahoga County voters overwhelmingly renewed the cigarette tax for the arts, distrust by artists of the organization they worked to establish could erode that support pretty quickly. The tragedy of that—besides the obvious—is that the individual artist program is, at three percent, a tiny fraction of Cuyahoga Arts Council’s grant making.”
Six Questions For The Art World As We Enter 2017
“Once, perhaps, the contemporary art world was composed of small, more or less local communities of struggling creatives who scraped along by helping one another and relying on the munificence of the occasional wealthy doyenne (who typically had bohemian leanings). But, for a while now, that art world has really been an art industry, vast and global in scope, epitomized by mega-galleries with dozens of employees and multiple locations, and patronized by the winners of the global economy who see new artworks as the ultimate status-boosting luxury commodity.”
Fake News? Try Fake Conferences And Fake Scientific Journals
“There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.”
How The Grinch Got Sued (Recounted In Seussian Verse)
Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show Who’s Holiday – about the heroic dastardly deeds of the Grinch’s wife – got cancelled last month when Dr. Seuss Enterprises grinched about copyright infringement. Now Lombardo is fighting back, in Federal court. (And yes, Robin Pogrebin tells the tale with rhyming couplets in dactylic tetrameter.)
The Battle For Creative Cities – Lessons From Oakland’s Ghost Ship
We appear to be confronted with two very different sets of criteria regarding what can be considered a “safe space.” One is rooted in alternative populations seeking respite from the omnipresent social factory and its all-pervasive marketplace; the other is based on municipal fire-code regulations intended to prevent the type of tragedies that the Ghost Ship now signifies.