Category: issues

“The Miami-based Knight Foundation on Sunday announced $25 million in new grants to South Florida cultural organizations that include the Perez Art Museum Miami, University of Miami Frost School of Music and the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, bringing its total investment in South Florida arts to $122 million since 2005.”

“Destroying some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures is something that flows from a fanatically purist interpretation of Sunni Islam as first laid down in 7th-century Arabia and revived more than a millennium later.” (scroll down to third headline)

“Coming to a choice parcel on Chestnut Street just west of Broad: neither a chic new condominium nor another drugstore. The Prince Music Theater isn’t going anywhere. The defunct theater in the center of town was sold Thursday to the Philadelphia Film Society – a transaction that not only gives the film group a new home, but also preserves the hall’s role for arts groups that cannot afford pricier venues like the Kimmel Center.”

“‘We are in despair with the government,’ Ali al-Nashmi, a professor of history at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said in a telephone interview. He was nearly in tears after hearing the reports about Hatra, which he said had been rare in Iraq for its classical ruins. ‘We are losing the country.'”

“Kang likens the USB sticks to the red pill from The Matrix: a mind-altering treatment that has the power to shatter a world of illusions.”

Scott Timberg, author of the recent book Culture Crash and of the ArtsJournal blog of the same title, lays out the half-dozen issues he’s left wondering about after writing the book and traveling to country to promote it.

“Several Los Angeles arts organizations are in fundraising mode now, or expect to be, including the Music Center, which is L.A.’s performing arts equivalent of Lincoln Center.”

“Recently, there have been a number of articles in the foreign press about Chinese censorship, with the tone highly critical of American authors who accept changes to their manuscripts in order to publish in mainland China. The articles tend to take a narrowly Western perspective: they rarely examine how such books are read by Chinese, and editors like Zhang are portrayed crudely, as Communist Party hacks. This was one reason I went on the tour – I figured that the best way to understand censorship is to spend a week with your censor.”

“I try to support what few record and book stores survive, and I still mourn the closing of Driggs Pizza in Williamsburg, where on our first date, my wife and I shared a few of the most exquisite pesto-enhanced grandma slices Brooklyn ever conceived. But I also like living in a city that moves to the beat of what Joseph Schumpeter referred to as “creative destruction,” one that innovates, evolves and experiences cultural ebbs and flows.”