Category: issues

“The issues at the heart of this conversation stretch well beyond ‘The Mikado’ and highlight a movement taking place, at varying speeds, across a number of artistic media.”

“Some of the music industry’s leading players are demanding that ticket touting be made a criminal offence for all UK concerts, plays and sporting events.”

“The two sites – the Carnegie library in Herne Hill, south-east London, and the Minet library nearby – closed their doors on 31 March before planned works to turn each one into a “community hub”, a combination of a largely unstaffed library and a private gym. The council said this was the only option to keep both libraries open amid massive central government cuts to local authority budgets.”

“New services and platforms are great for consumers, but our weak laws have allowed them to siphon revenue away from the underlying music, leaving songwriters, performers and the whole industry choking on their dust.”

“In a 1983 essay, the writer Alice Walker coined the word to explain ‘prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.’ Simply: lighter is better. … Yet even as terms like ‘yellowface’ and ‘whitewash’ sink into our cultural vocabulary, there remains confusion on basic matters of colorism.”

There have been demonstrations this week at several cultural landmarks in Rio de Janeiro, and “thousands of others have congregated at cultural institutions in the past week, most directly associated with the Ministry of Culture, in Brasília, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Fortaleza, and other cities.”

“At one end of the mural that was destroyed was written, ‘Ideas are forever.’ At the other end was, ‘Writing is Sacred.’ Writing, in this case, meant graffiti, Rollins said. It was how the students were getting their voices heard.”

“Acting President Michel Temer, who took over last week after president Dilma Rousseff’s suspension for an impeachment trial, has cut the number of ministries from 32 to 23 in a measure he says will help streamline a bloated government. However merging the culture portfolio into the education ministry has provoked a storm of protest led by the country’s cultural elite.”

“More than half the applicants failed to receive organisational support from the Australia Council’s four-year funding round, and 65 previously-funded organisations no longer have funding.”