“The art museum director pool of qualified leaders is very small and the demand very high. This fact causes museum directors to be among the highest compensated among nonprofit professionals (higher than college presidents, theater managing directors, social service executives, etc.). And boards are eager to hold onto their director, by offering deferred compensation and bonuses to retain CEOs and to keep them happy.”
Category: issues
Is Costa Rica’s Most Beloved Children’s Book A Racist Caricature?
“The book has long been compulsory reading in the Central American nation’s schools and has even given its name to various businesses, including the tourism website cocori.com. But now it is coming under scrutiny as never before. Members of Costa Rica’s black community – about 8 percent of the 4.9 million population – increasingly view it as a skewed interpretation of their identity by its white author.”
London Mayor Guarantees Public Monies For Garden Bridge
“The London mayor had promised that no more public money would be used on the project, following a £30m injection of cash by Transport for London. But Johnson has decided that the capital’s taxpayers will guarantee the future maintenance of the bridge – a decision that could mean considerable extra funding in future years.”
Britain Won’t Grant Visa To Actors From The Republic Of Georgia
“They are young, single, without dependents and have very little in their bank accounts, so cannot prove satisfactorily that they are ‘genuine’ visitors to the UK and would leave following their performances. Clearly, those who issue these visas have not peeked at the bank accounts of young British artists and seen how very little they earn too.”
Government-Sponsored Special Departments For Trolling
“The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster.”
Michael Kaiser: Our Endangered Arts
“His argument goes like this: In economic terms, the arts are playing a losing hand; in almost every other industry, the costs of production are reduced over time, allowing for more goods to be sold at a lower price point. Innovation and commodification contribute to this process, enabling goods to be produced ever-more cheaply and distributed on a vast scale, which in turn allows for the increasing segmentation of consumer markets and real-time adaptation to changing tastes and expectations. Alas, almost none of this is true for the arts.”
The Confusingly Simple New Canada Council
“There used to be 147 arts grant programs to apply for, divided by discipline – one for poetry, one for choreography, one for operating a gallery, etc. Now there are six general ones, and the Council has boasted of streamlining and simplifying the system. But what do the six categories represent?”
Medici-Style Patronage Can Save The Arts? Don’t Be So Sure
For one thing, how interested are today’s Medici – tech moguls – in funding arts? For another, “if you go back historically, you see that arts patronage was hardly a great deal for the artist the first time around.”
NY’s Park Avenue Armory Has Chosen Its Next Artistic Director
“He has led the Dutch National Opera since 1988 while also serving as artistic director of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam from 2004 until 2014. Somehow he found time to work as a critically acclaimed director, after founding London’s avant-garde Almeida Theater.”
Politically Correct? What’s Wrong With That?
“What has come to be called “political correctness” used to be known as “good manners” and was considered part of being a decent human being. The term is now employed to write off any speech that is uncomfortably socially conscious, culturally sensitive or just plain left-wing. The term is employed, too often, to shut down free speech in the name of protecting speech.”