Category: issues

“Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2% in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions. Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie.”

“Rachel Moore, a former dancer and the longtime top business executive of New York’s American Ballet Theatre, will be the next president and CEO of the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles.” The complex, the West Coast’s equivalent of Lincoln Center, is the home of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theater, Mark Taper Forum and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

“The arts council will remain a speck in an overall general fund budget of about $115.3 billion. Factoring in additional revenue — a $1.1-million federal grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and $2.5 million in projected donations from Californians who pay extra for special arts-supporter license plates or give via their state income tax returns — the arts council’s budget will reach $11.9 million, its biggest budget since 2004.”

“The Banff Centre is an internationally renowned arts incubator – and that is a reputation Price, on the job for about three months now, wants to cultivate and own. The centre also presents artistic programming, operates a conference centre and offers leadership-development programs.”

“For America’s middle-income vacationers, the Mickey Mouse club, long promoted as “made for you and me,” seems increasingly made for someone else. But far from easing back, the theme-park giant’s prices are expected to climb even more through a surge-pricing system that could value a summer’s day of rides and lines at $125.”

“This sentiment has a name: declinism. And it has a history, a scholarly one that amounts to much more than the perennial grousing of adults about kids these days. The notion of studying how things go to hell is almost exactly as old as the modern practice of historiography.” Laura Miller casts a gimlet eye on declinism from Gibbon to Spengler to Vargas Llosa – and points out the one way in which “culture” may indeed be dead (for now).

“Imagine cases of letters from Jeffrey Dahmer, funerary garments that clothe a corpse for casket viewing, ornate Tibetan kapala skulls, crime scene photographs, an autopsy video, and oddball items like underwear Aileen Wuornos wore on death row.” (Not to mention Dr. Kevorkian’s Thanatron.)

Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran): “It transforms your perspective, your manners, your relationships with friends, colleagues, students, with every waiter and cabdriver you meet. It changes your relationship with yourself.”

“Since reading McDougall’s article, I have changed the way I approach my job, as have several of my colleagues at Foyles. I am reading more books in translation, more books by writers from different racial or cultural backgrounds to my own and vastly more books by women. As a result I have included more books in these categories as my staff picks, not to achieve quotas, but because they are bloody good books.”

“Numerically, the depiction of rape on television is much closer to reflecting reality than, say, death by terrorist, serial killer, rogue CIA agent or the many clever murderers that fuel our detective series.”