Category: issues

“There are 60 cultural organizations now in the Brooklyn Cultural District, and there’s been a 149% increase in the number of Brooklyn cultural nonprofits since 2005. Local cultural institutions attracted $300 million in economic activity and 4.5 million visitors in 2013. So we are big business.”

“Ideally, university administrators, business executives, foundation directors, policymakers and many others—both in the private sector and in state and federal government—can and should benefit from the knowledge and wisdom embedded in the humanities. Unfortunately, these people are increasingly alienated from studying them in our colleges and universities.”

“The Sydney Theatre Report 2015 identified a severe shortage of affordable, suitable theatre venues in Sydney. There are currently no venues available for hire with less than 100 seats or under $2000 per week in rental.”

“Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. By limiting rules, parents encouraged their children to think for themselves. They tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” the Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile reports.”

“Criticism needs no defending. It’s a job because people (sometimes) pay you to do it, and many more people pay attention to it. Write whatever you want to me about the irrelevance and superfluity of critics when you’re complaining that my top-10 list left off your favorite novel; you’ve just proved you care enough about critics to gripe to and about one.”

“The news that the French President, François Hollande, cancelled a lunch Thursday in Paris with the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani … because the Iranians insisted that no wine be served at lunch, is generally being treated in the spirit of what I used to call the Sacre Bleu! Division of the Oh-Là-Là! School of Foreign Reporting from France.” Yet, writes Adam Gopnik, “the dispute touches on a real issue, worth pursuing: what is owed to guests who see the world differently?”

From Charlie Chaplin to Burns and Allen to Mae West to Redd Foxx to What’s Opera, Doc? to Phylllis Diller to Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine to Carol Burnett’s Went With the Wind to Richard Pryor to Seinfeld to The Simpsons to the greatest film comedy ever made …

“The long-established Bechdel test, first proposed by the US cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 comic strip, requires two women to talk to each other about something other than a man to prove its egalitarian values. Dargis said her ‘DuVernay test’ would merely require ‘African Americans and other minorities [to] have fully realised lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.'”

“By disproportionately supporting large institutions, which reach a tiny slice of the American population, mega-donors and corporate foundations use the arts to serve the one percent. Which is why a strong and robust NEA, and increased investment in public funding for the arts nationally, is needed today, more than ever.”

“‘This will diminish the opportunity for the arts to be present on a continuing basis in the central part of San Diego,’ he said. ‘And that’s the kernel of the issue. Let’s not forget that.'”