Category: issues

“There’s a small subset of words that trigger this nauseous reaction when we encounter them. We want to analyse what it is about these words that makes them so objectionable to us. They sit at the intersection of Jargon, Buzzwords, and Office Speak.”

“In his January report, New York state attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman looked at the number of tickets available to the general public. Analyzing the top grossing shows in New York between 2012 and 2015, it found that fewer than half of tickets sold were typically available to the general public for any given concert.”

“The advice pack – put together by Index on Censorship and Arts Council England – hopes to create a more cohesive approach to policing across different forces, with an emphasis on avoiding censorship. Its publication follows protests in recent years against performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Barbican Centre, which resulted in the cancellation of both shows.”

The number and frequency of posts on the blog had been falling rapidly in recent weeks; since the most recent redesign of nytimes.com, most of the content that would have appeared on ArtsBeat has simply been posted directly to the site’s main Arts page.

“Although the city’s arts and homeless communities intersect frequently in the present tough economic climate — with increasing numbers of artists and arts organizations being displaced from their homes and workplaces, artists creating art about living on the streets, and homeless services organizations offering arts activities to people in shelters — the collaboration is certainly unusual.”

“Art and content are not the same. Content is produced with a specific, marketable goal in mind. Patreon turns artists into content-makers whose creativity is moderated by their patrons. Patrons with more money have more clout, and the ability to withhold funding shapes what creators make. In this sense, Patreon reproduces key elements of the old patronage model, in which the power to commission and influence artists rests in the hands of those who can pay.”

Anna Holmes: “Here’s how I see it: Empathy is the ability to respect and maybe even understand another’s point of view, revealing larger truths about ourselves and others. Exploitation is the use of another’s experience for personal gain.”
James Parker: “To the degree that you are using a person, a character, simply to propel your plot or give shape to your ideas, to that same degree you are denying this character his or her full reality – and your story will suffer accordingly. Where empathy stops, in other words, exploitation starts.”

“It’s only May, but the international architectural press has already highlighted the Harbin Opera House, designed by the bad-boy architect Ma Yansong, as one of the year’s most interesting new buildings. … While cultural (and financial) capital becomes ever more concentrated, the dream of creative rebirth can be a seductive Pied Piper for administrators of languishing cities. After all, if every reader of design websites knows where Harbin is, then a full-throated recovery can’t be far off, right?”