Category: issues

“The Belgian artist Jan Fabre has resigned as artistic director after local artists rebelled against his plan to turn Greece’s major arts festival into ‘a tribute to Belgium’ and devote eight of the festival’s 10productions to those from his homeland.”

“The Whitney Plantation is unlocking the grim story of America’s greatest shame, a tale too often masked by a genteel preservationist approach to plantation history that has pasted romantic Gone With The Wind wallpaper over slavery’s appalling reality.”

“The 501(c)(3) model is increasingly challenged and is increasingly limited. Frankly a lot of the most exciting work now—especially among young artists—is not happening in a nonprofit context. We prided ourselves on our “sector purity” when I was growing up, that we were “nonprofit artists.” Young artists want to get the work done, whether it is commercial or nonprofit.”

“What might not have been clear if you followed the news stories and photographs is that there is also a modern town of Palmyra (Arabic Tadmur) adjacent to the ancient site, with tens of thousands of inhabitants. And here in microcosm is an unsettling problem/trend of the entire war.”

“Although the story of Apple’s design success is often presented in purely aesthetic or technological terms, the company’s innovations in that area had political and cultural dimensions, too: they were, among other things, an attempt to pry computer technology out of the hands of a particular group of men.”

Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist for Wicked, Pippin, Godspell and more, has pulled his works from North Carolina because of its new discrimination law. He says, “In the 1970’s, I, along with many other writers and artists, participated in a similar action against apartheid in South Africa, and as you know, this eventually proved to be very effective.”

“When the third version of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, or PIFA, breaks out around town beginning April 8, it will represent a more modest version of the arts extravaganza that ended with 200,000 people thronging a Broad Street fair in April 2011.”

“In a world where sex education is often basic, and porn is everywhere, author Christa Desir wants young adult fiction to be a place where kids can find answers and also questions about consensual sex. ‘What do you want? What’s pleasurable for you?’ she asks. ‘And what’s pleasurable for your partner? And how can you be intimate and it not be awkward?'”

“The country which has the highest per capita income in the world is treating its migrant labourers in conditions described by the Guardian newspaper as “modern-day slavery”. It is persecuting political dissenters and it put its greatest poet in prison and then only released him to avoid embarrassment when the attention of the international art world was briefly focused on the country. Qatar is importing so much from the West: architects, artists, scientists, universities, and much more besides. Why then, as some in the Gulf are brave enough to point out, does it not import freedom and the rule of law?”

“Ah, April. A month of cherry blossoms and light cardigans, birds twittering and taxes being filed. And, of course, peak harvest season for Switzerland’s world-famous spaghetti crop, which, thanks to an exceptionally mild winter, was experiencing a bumper year in 1957.”