“We need to learn how to construct plural truths and yet manage consistent ethics. We need to move away from monotheism. The different communities engaged with art have a potentially revolutionary role to play in this, especially if they again elide its old claim to autonomous action within the artistic field, with a real stake in a change in thinking about and acting in society.”
Category: issues
Why The Classics Are Holding Their Own In Colleges While Other Humanities Are On The Decline
“A recent statistical analysis of professorial job openings by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences shows declines in all humanities disciplines since the Great Recession of 2008, including classics. However, classics suffered least in the downturn. The field has kept its small market share, while the number of job postings fell precipitously in other humanities fields.”
Bill T. Jones And Claudia Rankine On How Art Can Respond To Violence And #BlackLivesMatter
“Choreographer Bill T. Jones and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine join [host Arun Venugopal] to discuss how the creative community has responded to violence and has embraced the Black Lives Matter movement.” (audio)
Pay To Play Casting Workshops In Los Angeles Now Under City Investigation
“Exchanging money for the prospect of employment is illegal in the state. Yet there have been no prosecutions by the City Attorney’s office since the 2009 legislation, known as the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, was enacted the following year.”
Where Is This Election Year’s Shepard Fairey?
“As the 2016 campaign season enters the nominating stage — the Republican National Convention opens on Monday in Cleveland; the Democratic National Convention follows the next week in Philadelphia — no image even approaching the power or reach of Mr. Fairey’s poster has emerged.”
What The Hell Happened To British Culture Between The London Olympics And This Brexit Disaster?
The man who wrote the opening ceremonies: “The ceremony didn’t depict a nation, it revealed it. It didn’t describe Britain, it WAS Britain – in the way that the Blitz spirit was or Dunkirk or The Last Night of the Proms. What. The. Hell. Happened?”
Our Pop Culture Is Filled With Anger
Visceral and at times frightening narratives are running through our popular culture. We get Batman and Superman — once the extensions of our better selves — battling each other in a grim rain; the take-no-prisoners TV commentaries of Samantha Bee and John Oliver; abrasive, if clever, comics like Amy Schumer; rage and betrayal in Beyonce’s “Lemonade”; meth and degradation in “Breaking Bad”; beheadings, dragons, torture and wars for supremacy in “Game of Thrones.”
‘The Hunger Games’ Foresaw The Meeting Of Reality TV And Politics
The titular games are themselves a reality TV show, after all, and (writes Alyssa Rosenberg) the franchise “feels uneasily resonant today not because [author of the books Suzanne] Collins treated reality programming as a diversion from more important things, but because she recognized the extent to which reality TV would capture our politics and become the means by which we make our most important decisions as a society.”
This French City Was Once ‘Culturally Dead’ – And Free Public Art Brought It Back To Life
“‘The city was culturally dead when I arrived here,’ says Jean Blaise, an artistic director and cultural impresario who has been based in Nantes since the mid-1980s. ‘There was one interesting festival and the opera house, that’s all.'” Now it’s France’s fastest-growing city and has real cachet. The key? “‘If you make people pay for culture, or only offer it in enclosed spaces like theatres or museums, you will only ever reach a small percentage of the population,’ Blaise says.”
Philly’s Kimmel Center Keeps Its CEO For Three More Years
“Anne Ewers, the Kimmel Center’s president and CEO since 2007, has been signed to a four-year contract extension that keeps her here at least through the 2019-20 season … Ewers in her time has retired the center’s debt, raised tens of millions for endowment and programs, developed a master plan of renovations that has been partially realized, overseen the coming and going of resident companies, and has greatly reduced the center’s own classical programming in favor of commercial presentations.”