Category: issues

“Chicago investment executive Mellody Hobson and her husband, Star Wars creator George Lucas, are donating $25 million to the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to support the construction of an arts building.”

Today, almost everywhere has more mobile phone penetration than land-lines: The continent of Africa has dismal fixed-line penetration of 1.4 subscriptions per 100 people, but 63.5 cell subscriptions.

“Generally, we begin screwing up by turning demographic research into inaccurate stereotypes. We find out how our audience differs from the general population, define it by those differences, and then aim our outbound communication at an imaginary person who embodies every one of those differences.”

It’s an “increasingly universal phenomenon: the public square as an epicenter of democratic expression and protest, and the lack of one—or the deliberate manipulation of such a space—as a way for autocrats to squash dissent through urban design.”

In addition to music by Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff, there were performances by the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Ballets, as well as an homage to artist Marc Chagall.

Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” would propel them – and Russia’s burgeoning protest movement – on to the global stage. It would also, arguably, mark the point at which that same movement lost any hope of success in Russia itself.

“In a wise world a way might be found to have the best of both plans. The hall could be kept, along with a new office building higher than the low-ish stepped design currently proposed, which for reasons of townscape feels obliged to limbo dance beneath an invisible height limit. It could be beautiful, this coexistence of market and office building, not a compromise.”

“Those who seldom or never dine at the Four Seasons may feel estranged from an argument about the artistic integrity of a place where billionaires cluster over bluefin sashimi and roast squab with truffle sauce. But the survival of a Picasso, even a semipublic one, should concern everybody.”

The two men’s “hopes of rewriting history were dashed … when a self-posted trailer on YouTube for a documentary detailing and revealing their exploits, drew almost universal condemnation and angered Egyptian authorities.”

“Technological advances, shifting artistic values and dizzying spikes in art prices have turned the world of visual arts into a boxing ring for intellectual-property rights disputes.”