Category: issues

“Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. And unless you’re a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.”

“In just the past six months, Snapchat has blundered (twice!) into releasing filters that it’s hard not to read as extremely racist.”

Five years ago in Indonesia, a crested macaque named Naruto found a photographer’s unattended digital camera and took what became known worldwide as the “monkey selfie.” Last year, PETA filed a lawsuit arguing that Naruto was legally the creator of the image, which should be considered its intellectual property. PETA lost the first round, but the appeal is now in court.

“The day after their termination, the artists sent out a joint statement claiming that they had been “run out of town” by MAA and that the Mill Hill Social Practice Residency was an “art-washing” scheme. This scathing essay set off a stink bomb that caused a flurry of national attention and made both MAA and the artists look unprofessional.”

“The Heraean Games, a separate festival honoring the Greek goddess Hera, demonstrated the athleticism of young, unmarried women. The athletes, with their hair hanging freely and dressed in special tunics that cut just above the knee and bared their right shoulder and breast, competed in footraces.”

“This spring, with a six-district pilot, New Hampshire joined a small but growing list of at least a half-dozen states experimenting with large-scale arts testing. Educators prefer to call the new exams “assessments,” because they’re so different in form and format from traditional standardized tests. The goal, though, is to create a common “test”—often in the form of a project—that can be given to students in different classrooms across the state and used to help compare the performance of schools and districts.”

“Veteran arts impresario Richard Demarco warned that the Brexit vote was the biggest threat to the Edinburgh Festival in its history and was a betrayal of its roots. Mr Barley admitted Brexit would mean a “seismic shift” in the UK’s cultural landscape but insisted this need not mean ‘doom and gloom’ for Edinburgh’s festivals, which are facing the prospect of public funding cuts in the next few years.”

“Since 2010, the culture sector’s economic contribution has grown by 33%, from £20.3 billion to £27 billion in 2015. The sector is now worth 1.6% of the UK’s entire economy … The government estimates the cultural sector’s worth to the UK economy has grown by 15% alone between 2014 and 2015.”

“In 1906, he unveiled this idea to the IOC: the Olympic Games should include gold, silver and bronze medals in five categories of the arts: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. Like sports competitors, the artists participating in the new “Pentathlon of the Muses” were supposed to be amateurs.”