Category: issues

“According to the annual population survey, the percentage of the working age population with some form of disability is 19%. The report found that, in 2014/15, 26 of the largest NPOs – those that employ more than 50 people – had no disabled employees at all.”

“In the wake of this deprofessionalization, we find ourselves without professional careers, and so observe with common sense that we must go into business for ourselves, we must be entrepreneurs. Common sense, of course, as an expression of dominant cultural ideas, is the most ideological of the senses. We’ve become hybrids, hyphenates—just like actor-managers were. While we can think of this positively, that yes, we have diverse interests and opportunities as artists, we should remember the economic conditions that force us to be hybrids: single professional career tracks that would pay for our bills and our retirements are closed off.”

“Dozens of local artists were abruptly evicted Monday from their work spaces at the Bell Foundry building in the city’s Station North Arts District after city officials said they discovered a variety of safety violations in the two-story hub of theater, art and recording studios. The move … came days after a fire in an Oakland, Calif., warehouse used for art studios killed at least 36 people, a reality not lost on many tenants and supporters of the community workspace.” (includes video)

This is in France, where a little town overlooking Lake Geneva installed a statue of the Blessed Virgin in a public park in 2011, and a court has now ordered the figure’s removal. (Maybe this is a job for the Satanic Temple?)

The study by GuildHE, a representative body for higher education, found creative-focused universities and colleges generate at least £8.4bn each year by meeting the needs of employers for creative, qualified, trained workers.

“The ads’ appearance illuminates a vexing consequence of a growing method of ad buying on the Internet, in which companies often have no idea where their commercial messages are showing up or which publishers they are financially supporting.”

Um. “When asked to elaborate on the nature of his company’s difficulties regarding hiring actors and actresses of color, Abbott cited the fact that the majority of production takes place in Canada … and the channel’s high volume of production.”

Artists band together in unsafe living conditions all over expensive urban areas like New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and more. Now property owners, freaked out by the Ghost Ship fire, are handing out evictions – and the artists have no place to go. (Meanwhile, the warehouses are becoming condos for tech workers.)

Writer Kameron Hurley: “We are going to lose much in 2017. That is something that we as writers, as artists, as human beings, cannot forget … but we cannot allow it to let us lose our hope or our ability to tell the stories that not only earn us our supper but also inspire and comfort others during times of great upheaval.”