Category: issues

“Back then, part of the excitement within the hip-hop subculture, as it still was at that time, was the dawning realization of the potential for hip-hop marketization,” says Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom. “Many artists, from poor backgrounds as they often were, didn’t see this as selling out.”

“It is pointless having a top-down commitment to access and diversity from the government-supported institutions if considerable cuts to funding are forcing local authorities to narrow their cultural programmes and opportunities.”

“From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to São Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique. Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling.

“[Ben] Affleck’s family used to own slaves, a fact that he sought to cover up before his episode aired, according to e-mails from the Sony hack, uploaded last week and cataloged into a searchable database on the WikiLeaks site.”

“‘It’s a changing market out there,’ says Summerlea Kashar, the museum’s executive director. ‘It’s hard for organizations like us to keep up with that acceleration.'”

“Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans. Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency.”

“In my arrogance and certitude that everyone must see the work as I did, I left myself wide open to journalism’s greatest hazard: quotations lacking context or the sense of irony or self-­deprecating humor with which they were delivered.”

“As the US economy has picked up steam in the last few years, falling oil prices and a stronger dollar have left the peso floundering. Last month, the Mexican currency hit its lowest value since 1993 … The tumble has the federal government here drawing blood from public funds, especially the arts and culture sector.”

Neil MacGregor at the British Museum, Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre and Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic Theatre. “As the three men all took up their posts between 2002-4, their incumbencies have overlapped for a decade and all faced a very similar challenge: how to attract larger and broader audiences at a time when, in the case of Hytner and MacGregor, their public funding was diminishing in real terms and, for Spacey, was non-existent.”