Category: issues

“Our purpose here is to consider preexisting conditions that made the arts sector particularly vulnerable to the recession, as well as to evaluate actions taken by arts leaders – first to stabilize their organizations, then to experiment with new approaches to delivering their missions.”

“We’re all aware by this point that political polarization is a persistent issue to a forehead-slapping degree, but we feel it in the arts, too. I recently taught a playwriting class to teenagers, and found that many of their plays were written from the extreme right and left perspectives.”

“If so much of what we do on the Internet is harmful to us, and harmful to one another, perhaps we should do less of it. But that turns out to be not so simple. There’s no clear boundary between a hard-to-quit behavior and a compulsive one.”

“Not a single person on the board of trustees has links to Bradford, or indeed the wider region. We cannot have decisions about our city and our region being made by the ‘great and the good’ in London.”

“Maya Widmaier Picasso, who is the artist’s daughter with his French mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, issued a statement through her lawyer Thaddeus Stauber on Friday saying she sold a 1931 plaster bust of her mother, ‘Bust of a Woman,’ to a New York dealer, Larry Gagosian, in May. The dealer subsequently sold it to Mr. Black for roughly $106 million, a record-high price for any Picasso sculpture.”

Islam Gawish, a 26-year-old satirist with 1.6 million Facebook followers, was arrested last Sunday, ostensibly for running a website without a license. Following a swell of online protest, authorities released him the next day with the statement that he was found not to have any links with terrorists.

Judge John Darrah’s ruling Thursday means construction will at least be delayed and the legal proceedings could end up killing the project in Chicago.

“The official population of Morundah in NSW is 76 but Councillor David Fahey says only 24 people ‘actually live in the village’. … But the first time the local Morundah Bush Entertainment Committee put on an opera in 2006, it sold 1100 tickets in three hours. … Since then the tiny Riverina town has become a regional cultural hub serving not only the Urana Shire population of about 1200 but also drawing regular tourists from around Australia.”

“After engaging more than 4,000 citizens for input over the course of 10 months, the 34-member arts plan steering committee announced in January that a draft of the plan is ready, with eight overarching goals, both short- and long-term, and 63 strategies designed to help achieve these goals.” (The plan was approved by the City Council that day.)

“The starving artist myth is a limiting belief that’s been passed on from generation to generation and it’s about time we put an end to it. Not only is it disempowering to artists trying to promote themselves and their work, it’s also a barrier for many talented teenagers and young adults who will not pursue a career in the arts from fear of not being able to support themselves and later on in life, their families.”