Category: issues

“Scots who consider themselves to be artists living in the land of their birth are increasingly uneasy about the instrumentalism of all this, how the arts are fine as long as they earn, and as long as it’s seen as definitively Scottish. … That’s okay while when there’s still an enthusiastic cultural traffic between Scotland and the rest of the UK, but the Scot Nats want to end it on Thursday.”

“Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, Grand Opera House and Ulster Orchestra are among the 31 arts organisations that will receive a cut of at least 2.3% this autumn from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the funding body has confirmed today. The ACNI said the decision” – the result of a mid-year budget cut from the provincial government – “would mainly impact on education and outreach programmes.”

“The rights to some of Maier’s work may hinge on a rental agreement she signed for a storage unit — a storage unit on which she later defaulted.”

“The politics isn’t in the science itself — science is raw data, as close to the truth as you can get. The funding is about how we are interpreting that knowledge to further an agenda”

The Barbican Centre’s planned ‘Exhibit B’ “invites liberals to feel the ‘discomfort’ of their colonial history while fawning over the naked and prostrate black body.”

“While 53% of lesbian and gay actors were ‘out’ to all or most of their fellow actors, the report found that only 36% had revealed to agents they were gay, and only 13% had told industry executives.”

“It isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should we mourn the departed or dance on its grave?”

Doesn’t exist. “When is the right time to tell people about their job prospects? In graduate school? Before they even apply to graduate school? Or sooner than that even—in their first creative writing class? Never? Let them Google it because it’s just too depressing otherwise?”

The head of the Australian consumer advocacy group Choice told a forum in Sydney, “The fundamental test if we are going to do something is we need to be confident it will work. If you look at site blocking it is like whacking moles. People who run websites move much faster than courts.”

Alex Ross: “As in previous years, the [2014] selection demonstrates the degree to which the awards have diverged from their original mission – to pay tribute to luminaries of theatre, dance, classical music, and show business – and instead become one more temple of celebrity culture, magnifying the fame of already familiar faces. … The logic that has taken hold of the Honors is one of pop triumphalism: it’s not enough for pop culture to dominate the mainstream; it must colonize the spaces occupied by older genres and effectively drive them from the field.”