Category: issues

“It is a notably upbeat claim, especially when compared with the hand-wringing that typically accompanies talk of public intellectuals in America, who seem always to be in the act of vanishing. The few who remain pale in comparison to the near-mythic minds that roamed the streets of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when rents were cheap, polemics were harsh, and politics were radical. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. What happened? Intellectuals who couldn’t survive as freelance writers — and as New York gentrified, who could? — became professors. By the 1960s, few nonacademic intellectuals remained. Careerism and specialization gradually opened up a gulf between intellectuals and the public. The sturdy prose of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe gave way, by the mid-90s, to the knotted gender theorizing of Judith Butler and the cult-studies musings of Andrew Ross.”

Virginia Hepner arrived at the Woodruff, which includes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Alliance Theatre and the High Museum of Art, in May of 2012 – at a point when the ASO was going through financial woes and bitter labor battles and a Woodruff employee had embezzled $1 million. She’ll be leaving it in much better shape next May.

Bill Marx looks at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times’ cutbacks in arts coverage: “Too many of today’s arts editors and reviewers embrace a lilliputian vision of arts criticism, a crabbed sense of its possibilities. I teach a class at Boston University on writing arts criticism, and can testify that most of these wanna-be critics have not read any reviews that date earlier than 2000.”

The Justin Trudeau government announced that the Council’s government allocation would double. But instead of just giving the country’s major arts groups more money, the Council will diversify. The council has been talking for at least a decade about doing more to reflect the changing nature of art-making in an increasingly diverse Canada.”

“Traditionally, the humanities (history, literature, art, philosophy, etc.) have provided a place for broadening life in the democracies. Today universities have become a site for a bitter struggle between no-nonsense job training and the grander possibilities of the imagination.”

According to a new study in the UK, it is – both artistically and financially. “Research into the international activity of arts and cultural organisations, commissioned by Arts Council England, found that 243 of England’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) generated £34m through international activities in 2014/15.”

Teju Cole lays out the parallels.

The museum, which has been under construction in Gdansk for five years and is supposed to open in January, was a project of the previous government, unseated last year by the right-wing Law and Justice Party. The new government, which controls funding, isn’t happy with the museum’s content.

“Theater, and art in general, have the power to change the world. And way too many of us relinquished that power in service of preserving our donor base and protecting white fragility. We used our power to produce Miss Saigon. We used our power to produce The Mikado. We used our power to enable blackface, brownface, redface, cripface and yellowface. We used our power to victimize women. We used our power to produce multiple stories about white people lamenting to other white people about how the world is changing in front of audiences of white people. We used our resources to keep our lights on and our heads down while ignoring the small-handed, bloviating barbarian at the gate. And now he is here and we are “shocked.” Why? We built this.”

“The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?”