Category: issues

“The … relationship the Music Center has with its resident companies is arm’s-length, remote, not collaborative. Each resident company is in its own little private world; collaboration is not encouraged.”

“Before the internet, we all thought of art as a one-way phenomenon: there were creators and there were consumers. True or not, that’s what we thought. Now, though, the means of cultural production have been democratized, and art is becoming, in all genres, a many-to-many phenomenon. Anyone can make it—and everyone does—and we all still engage with it, too.”

“Perhaps we are entering a new age of radicalism individualism, in which the very idea of enjoying public space together is giving way to something more anarchic and carnivalesque.”

Laura Miller: “You can defend the right to speak without admiring the content of the speech. However, … it is the act of continuing to speak in the face of a [literally] murderous effort to silence them that the award commemorates, not the particular content of that speech.”

Glenn Greenwald has posted “the key documents giving rise to the controversy that has erupted inside PEN America over the award the group is bestowing on Charlie Hebdo” – most notably, correspondence between writer Deborah Eisenberg (who withdrew from the awards gala) and PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel.

“Muhammad ‘no longer interests me,’ Rénald Luzier, who works under the name Luz, said in an interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles … ‘I’ve gotten tired of it, just as I got tired of drawing Sarkozy.'”

“Anti-copyright crusaders love to shout about remix culture and how copyright aims to stop it. Real artists understand. Remix culture was not invented by the Internet.”

“When a Web site broke the news on April 3 that, instead of posting an Internet link to an article about writing legal briefs, I had inadvertently sent my law school students a link to a porn site, I thought I could never recover. (And if you’re hoping to find out here how that happened, among the many possibilities that have been raised by gleeful commentators, I’m sorry to tell you you’re going to be disappointed.)”

“‘It’s our job to give people voice that have been voiceless and make visible those that have been invisible,’ said [Lonnie] Bunch, addressing why the NMAAHC decided to host a symposium on such a controversial topic. ‘This must be a museum that helps America remember its past to better understand its present.'”

“Asserting Native voice in the exhibition is represented by gigantic blow-up photographs of Native people in the exhibition, quotes, videos, interviews, representation in the gift shop, participation in the catalog, is inaccurate and disingenuous.”