Category: issues

Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia fame: “Births, deaths, celebrity mug shots, piano-playing kittens, children we don’t know engaging in wackiness, war, poverty, photos of salt shakers and table sets, tales of the mundane, puns: This is all funneled and flattened, much to our delight and convenience, of course.”

“In [Armond] White’s view, the expulsion was symptomatic of what he sees as a group in decline, beholden to studios that help foot the dinner’s bill and reviewers who are unwilling, if not unable, to criticize films as eruditely as he can — and thus they are jealous and vindictive.”

“Hollywood’s insistence that white people have set black people free seems like a sign that maybe, possibly, we could stand to hear other truths.”

Hollywood was ready for Sir Ian to come out, but it’s not quite a ‘post-queer’ paradise for everyone.

There’s room in the world for all kinds of art, and that includes retro art. But I also think that “how does this relate to other things from its own time?” is a more productive question for composers than “does this appeal to young people with mainstream tastes?”

The suburban D.C. county made a deal with Wells Fargo to cut in half the $60 million owed on the Workhouse Arts Center, built in a former prison in Lorton, and then assumed the remaining debt for the county.

“It’s generally accepted – for a host of artistic, historical and economic reasons – that London should indeed receive a greater share of funding. But the proportion of Arts Council money that gets spent outside of London has been falling for decades, even though the Government’s own surveys show that the average Londoner is no more likely to enjoy the arts than his country cousin.”

“Imagine if, years ago, MySpace or AltaVista had cut deals with cable companies to block Facebook and Google. Without network neutrality, telecom and cable companies could also stifle free expression. They’d have the legal right to block articles like this one.”

While describing his audience as “spark plugs that can ignite” cultural growth in L.A., the mayor pointedly did not promise to fuel the engine with increased city government funding of the arts. The current core budget of the Department of Cultural Affairs is $8.96 million, down 38.5% from where it stood a decade ago, adjusting for inflation.

The funding level came as a relief to arts advocacy group Americans for the Arts, which wrote in an email to supporters today that the budget survived a “fractious appropriations process and a government shut-down that lasted 16 days” and “avoided the disastrous proposal” in the House of Representatives to slash NEA funding by 49%.