“More than half of all Canadians listen to music daily, read fiction several times a month or more and have visited a museum or art gallery in the last year. The numbers who go to concerts and plays are smaller, but when asked what kind of event they like to attend outside the home, 34 per cent of Canadians chose the arts while 29 per cent chose sports. That last stat contains a big message for business sponsors who sometimes prefer to lend their names to sporting events because they judge them to be more popular – and more populist.”
Category: issues
Hiding Behind Falsifiability
“Basically, it refers to whether or not a belief can be proven wrong. If I tell you that I weigh 70 pounds, this is a claim that can be easily tested and promptly thrown out by bringing me to a scale — that is, it’s falsifiable. If, on the other hand, I tell you that everything in the universe is controlled by an invisible astral monkey with a million arms, then there’s little you can do to prove, empirically, that this is a zany notion.”
Drones In Popular Culture
“In recent years, not just in novels but in movies, television, poetry, video games and the visual arts, drones have taken on a life of their own. As a character, they are menacing, melancholy or gallant; beastly, blind, snub-nosed, noisy and fast … They show off the military talent of their users, or they are an expression of unbridled hubris. They represent protection or extermination – and they carry out both things at once.”
Peter Sellars: To Examine Difficult Things In Art Is Not To Endorse Them
“Looking at something does not mean you’re endorsing it. One can abhor an event, yes, but one also needs to understand it. Yet the US today is coming close to censorship.”
Miami’s Getting Another Arts Center, Complete With Starchitect Design
“A new Miami Beach arts center designed by Rem Koolhaas is to open in December 2015 … Called Faena Forum, the 50,000-square-foot institution … will serve as a public forum for the exploration of topics in the arts, sciences, technology, politics and urbanism. It will also encourage dialogue about Latin American cultural practices.”
Here’s What’s Wrong With How We Teach Students Today (It’s A Values Issue)
“The primary responsibility of teachers is no longer to encourage good behavior in future citizens, as Horace Mann insisted. Instead, it’s to ensure that they get the right answers on a high-stakes test.”
US Congress Asked To Create A Protector Of Cultural Property
The Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act asks Congress to appoint a cultural property protection czar and establish emergency import restrictions to protect endangered cultural patrimony. The bill aims to “deny terrorists and criminals the ability to profit from instability by looting the world of its greatest treasures.”
The Arts Are Booming In Turkey (But Beneath The Boom, All’s Not So Well)
“Galleries abound. The Istanbul Design Biennial is in full swing. Three new private art museums are in the works, including one designed by the London-based star architect Zaha Hadid. The rock and jazz scenes are thriving. A Turkish film, “Winter Sleep,” took the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival this year.”
L.A. Music Center At 50: How It Changed Los Angeles
“Not only had Los Angeles built the nation’s second major modern performing arts center, after New York’s Lincoln Center, we built it our way. And the world noticed. … Fifty years later we can look back and see the extent to which the Music Center shaped Southern California’s cultural identity. It got not only the world to take us more seriously but we began to take ourselves more seriously.”
How Dorothy Chandler Got The L.A. Music Center Built
“The campaign she led resulted in about $19 million in private donations – equivalent to about $146 million today – and a permanent home for the L.A. Phil. It was a feat that Time magazine called … ‘perhaps the most impressive display of virtuoso money-raising and civic citizenship in the history of U.S. womanhood.'”