Category: issues

“Heritage groups have accused the government of failing to protect Britain’s world heritage sites after effectively allowing plans for a development on London’s South Bank that will obscure views of the Houses of Parliament.”

Randy Cohen on his annual list: “Changes this year include updating #3 with the BEA’s new Arts in the GDP research, #8 to include a statement about the benefits of the arts in the military, and #10 includes the new Creative Industries data (now current as of January 2015).”

“Trying to find causation between arts education and better academic performance within other disciplines is a bootless errand. I do not believe that it is an effective strategy for arts educators to justify our existence through the improvements the arts may or may not contribute to learning in other disciplines. So what do we do?” Peter Duffy offers some ideas.

“The Arts Index, which has been updated to include figures from 2012/13 and 2013/14, is described as a ‘health check’ on the arts in England and is measured by 20 indicators including financial inputs and outputs, and community and participation levels.”

“For over a decade, the country has embraced ‘Cool Japan,’ a government-supported movement focused on selling what many have described as its ‘gross national cool.’ … There is some irony at work here – an eagerness to promote something as trendy usually signals the opposite – but for years the country’s efforts have paid off. “

“Mark Stern and Susan Seifert suggest that cultural participation is one component–valued in its own right–of the broader concept of human wellbeing. Though the sentiment might seem obvious, the implication is not: it allows us to elegantly sidestep (if not quite resolve) the whole question of intrinsic vs. instrumental benefits by framing the idea instead as direct vs. indirect contributions to wellbeing.”

“We are seeing “a great renaissance of public shaming”. Social media, and Twitter in particular, has evolved into a rolling witch-hunt where reputations are smashed irreparably as the result of one ill-judged tweet or Facebook post. In extreme cases, a transgressor’s online identity never recovers: they bear the modern equivalent of being branded on the forehead.”

When did “difficulty” become suspect in American culture, widely derided as anti-democratic and contemptuously dismissed as evidence of so-called elitism? If a work of art isn’t somehow immediately “understood” or “accessible” by and to large numbers of people, it is often ridiculed as “esoteric,” “obtuse,” or even somehow un-American.

Jon Lee Anderson: “All around the Middle East, archeological treasures of the ancient world have been stripped of their original glory – often, of what some call graven images. ISIS’s fanatics do so hatefully, as if to spite all others, but they are not the only perpetrators. Muslim extremists have long sought to destroy the physical evidence that any other faith worth valuing existed before their own.”