Category: issues

“The literary and visual arts,” they write, “have long-standing and venerable roles in fortifying the lessons of clinical empathy, communication skills, critical thinking, and attention”—crucial qualities that can easily get overlooked in an era of assembly line office visits, where a doctor’s attention is often more focused on lab-test data than actual communion with the patient.

“Comedy has long been used by outsiders to ease the worries of a distrustful society, and Muslim stand-up comedians in New York are no different. A coming three-day comedy festival will spotlight their perspective, but their recent efforts to counter Islamophobia through humor have had mixed results.”

These days more and more artists are challenging the bohemian stance that artists should shun economic capital in favor of pursuing art for art’s sake. Artists and creative workers increasingly lick their low-income wounds publicly and vent about the elaborate dance of self-reinvention in the digital age. It’s become trendy to discuss and even quantify exactly how little money is being made from creative projects. Mathematics has never looked so hip.”

Carolina Miranda: “I feel as if we, in the cultural classes, have been perfectly happy to get caught up in the mythology that L.A. is somehow a Xanadu of art-making. Certainly, there are worse places to be an artist. (Brooklyn comes to mind.) But let’s get real about the situation here in Los Angeles.”

Scott Timberg: “Remember that bittersweet feeling, halfway between queasy and liberating, when you’ve decided you’re going to break up with someone but don’t know when, where, or how you’ll pull the trigger? Someone, that is, with whom you still share a connection but can no longer abide? I’ve lived with this weird ambiguity for almost a decade now. And I’m not talking about dumping my wife.”

“The increasing difficulty in living and working in some major cities affects not just the artists, but the newer and the smaller and the mid-sized arts organizations housed in these cities. Increasingly they too are being priced out. Some of these organizations are finding it difficult to continue to stay in the very cities they might have helped create.”

Tzara composed what he termed “African poems,” and his girlfirend led a danse nègre at the Cabaret Voltaire. Grosz danced jigs while wearing a straw hat and blackface. Picabia painted two canvases he titled Negro Song. Clément Pansaers published a pamphlet titled Le Pan Pan au Cul du Nu Nègre. “Clearly, Norman Mailer did not invent the ‘white negro’.”

“The rise of clickbait has made weirdness ubiquitous, but it has also selected for those memes that are just weird enough to glide smoothly through social media: things that are unexpected in the most expected kind of way.”

“After more than 400 organisations spent months developing their applications, the entire round was cancelled after Brandis ripped $104.7m from the Australia Council’s funding in the May budget, in order to create his new national program for excellence in the arts.”

“Every step of the way, every distributor, every festival has received multiple threatening letters from the Church of Scientology. Some have come very close to buckling.”