Category: issues

USA, as it’s known (is there a branding doctor in the house?), was launched in the prerecession happy days by four major funders—the Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmussen Foundations. Together they donated $22 million in seed money for a new organization with a double mission: to “invest in America’s finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society.”

“The biggest offender is still the alternative minimum tax, despite the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which brought long-overdue reform. Two provisions of the A.M.T. hit a disproportionate number of actors, screenwriters and directors: In calculating it, taxpayers can’t deduct employee business expenses, nor can they deduct state, local and property taxes.”

“When June O’Neill took over as executive director of the Philadelphia Cultural Fund 12 years ago, she barely had time to find her desk before Mayor John F. Street announced he was slashing the fund and eliminating the city’s Office of Arts and Culture. That was followed by the 2008 fiscal crisis, which saw the fund, an independent nonprofit that receives its budget entirely from the city, cut [by] 42.5 percent … [She’s] been through it all.”

“America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher. This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts.”

Thirty-something artist Cao Fei: “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation. When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. I was more interested in subcultures, in pop culture.”

“Considering how much uproar the piece ignited, the apology is pretty weak, with co-editor in chief Mike Fleming Jr. seeming to place a lot of blame on the headline, which ‘created a context from which no article could recover.'”

“Yemen’s artists, with photography a prominent art form that has produced several significant female photographers, were still working and producing interesting art, curators say. But ‘it is quite a challenge to be an artist in the country.'”

“Tate Gallery says ‘new information’ has emerged over a John Constable painting in its collection thought to have been stolen by the Nazis. It has asked for a review of a recommendation that it should return the work to the heirs of the original owner.”

“The welcome emergence of London as possibly the leading creative industry hub in the world has disguised the lack of equivalent growth outside London, and this situation should be addressed by government as a priority,” it concludes.