Category: issues

The fees have gone up to fund free visas for refugees, says the US Citizen and Immigration Services. The fee hike will hurt more than the artists: “When only the wealthy kids who can hire an agency to advocate for their passage are coming, I can’t help but think that hardworking foreign artists aren’t the only ones missing out on something.”

“While performances have occasionally been called off on past election nights, many more have been canceled this year, as producers bet that it will be tough for music and drama to compete with history. That is partly a reflection of the high interest in the race pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Clinton, which has already broken television ratings records at several points. And it is partly a bow to the ascendancy of the smartphone, which has left audiences more connected — and more distractible — than ever.”

Is it fair for one aspect of an organisation’s work to tar the rest? And, equally, can the sector become more diverse and inclusive by ‘naming and shaming’?

“Even amid calls by Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, for building a wall at that border, the art scene in the San Diego-Tijuana megalopolis has assumed a consciously and exuberantly binational ethos.”

Hu Ping, author of the now-seminal 1979 essay “On Freedom of Speech,” and once an enthusiastic young Maoist: “The Cultural Revolution gave rise to a widespread and deep-seated horror that led a few people” – Chinese who’d never read John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or the American Founding Fathers – “to formulate an explicit concept of freedom and gave the majority the desire and basis to accept this concept.”

“History reveals the enormous variety and variability of human institutions and behaviour, setting clear limits on the validity and plausibility of any universalising generalisations. The problem for any would-be applied historian lies in converting this necessary corrective of over-confident social-scientific assertions or politicians’ simplistic assumptions – the historian’s reflex ‘actually, it’s rather more complicated than that’ – into anything resembling the sort of practical policy advice that politicians or civil servants will ever take seriously.”

“Unsung heroes of arts administration are the individuals who keep the trains running on time, who will never be handed the microphone at the annual gala to “say a few words,” who won’t have the opportunity after a career in the cultural sector to give a curtain speech, or even make the announcement asking us to silence our cell phones. Those veterans and rookies for which we all know full well that the show would not go on without them. Those people who make our workplaces more pleasant, including those who might secretly keep watering the office fern no matter how hard we try to kill it.”

“The danger, in such a situation, is not that the critic will give a soft ride to her fellow beneficiaries.” Longtime Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington explains where he feels the dangers do lie.

In a speech decrying growing censorship, Konstantin Raikin, director and lead actor of the Satirikon Theatre, said, “I see how people are itching to change things and send us back to the past. And not just to the time of stagnation, but further back – to Stalin’s times.” Putin’s spokesman gave a “no, but” denial – and then the Night Wolves got involved.

Ed Vaizey, who was removed from his position as arts minister by prime minister Theresa May in July, said: “Let’s not beat about the bush: the arts are relentlessly left wing. As the former [London] mayor’s head of culture once said: there is no pro-fox hunting play. Indeed, there are no plays about over-powerful trade unions letting down their members. As a Remainer [myself], there is no pro-Brexit play attacking unaccountable Brussel’s bureaucrats building a European superstate. There’s no play exposing the corruption and abuse in a country like Venezuela – why not?”