Category: issues

“Few would argue that the rankings have helped shape a world in which students are seen as consumers, and colleges and universities as commodities. The rankings are a key reason the higher-education landscape today operates like a marketplace in which institutions compete to convince the best students to buy their product.”

“This year marks the first time higher education data experts QS have ranked universities by their performing arts capabilities, which they have done for a number of other subjects for the past six years. Ratings were based on the opinion of more than 75,000 academics and nearly 45,000 employers, as well as the analysis of 28.5 million research papers.”

Who could possibly object to Yuppie International Towers or Merlin Champagne Town? Chinese officialdom does – and it’s demanding that developments have names like “Yellow River” instead.

“Over the past decade or so, Bateman has become a pop something, a grinning, blood-flecked national gargoyle. A brash new musical based on American Psycho is set to open on Broadway. You can purchase Bateman action figures. Bateman memes – photographs and GIFs from the director Mary Harron’s excellent 2000 film version of American Psycho – splash across every corner of the web. (‘I have to return some videotapes’ is among the movie’s indelible lines.)”

“Whereas 240 years ago the Bolshoi company consisted of just 43 members. Now the theater’s staff numbers more than three thousand. Not just performing artists, [Bolshoi director Vladimir] Urin says, but ‘a whole army of skilled technical staff – stagehands, makeup artists, costume designers, and lighting technicians.'”

“Classics and antiquity have lost cultural cache in the age of disruption, and there is no longer an aristocratic imperative to support noble projects of lofty ambition. Today we’ve neither dutiful Kings, Vaticans, or robber barons to seduce the hoi polloi into complicity with visions of the transplendent. Nor do the experiments in democracy we deem “states” seem to be doing much better, having withdrawn much of the already measly funding available for highbrow cultural endeavors.”

For instance, it was once owned by an Oxford mathematics professor, and at one point Stalin had to talk Lenin out of tearing it down.

This could be a much longer list – and it doesn’t even mention art’s role in AIDS awareness. But art has often help change our politics…

“To assess arts vibrancy across America, we incorporate four measures each under three main rubrics: demand, supply and public support for arts and culture on a per capita basis.”