Category: issues

“The 64-year-old filmmaker called it ‘deaf and insensitive’ to the country’s problems and railed against its ‘awful cultural policy.’ Spanish state funding to the arts, including film, has been drastically reduced in recent years.”

“About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It’s astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.”

“Perhaps Perry mimics geishas because she recognizes in them the same elaborate traditions of costume, makeup, dance, singing, and erotic performance, to a commercial end, of which she is a part.”

“As the violence snowballed and spilled onto the streets I walked past the museum door, looked at the building’s red facade and tried imagining the silence inside.”

Rex Ranch in Arizona is poised to become an ambitious artists’ retreat, if a Sundance Institute executive can come up with the money to buy the 50-acre former dude ranch by the middle of December.”

“Creative industries led by Hollywood account for about $504 billion, or at least 3.2 percent of U.S. goods and services, the government said in its first official measure of how the arts and culture affect the economy.”

David Lowery, frontman for Camper van Beethoven and Cracker, and now copyright activist: “The bigger fight here is that if they can do this with our songs, with our lyrics, then they can do it with your Instagram photos, they can do it with your Facebook profile, they can do it with anything you put on your Web page without your permission. That’s what permissionless innovation is.”

“If we view people as capable of feeling, but not capable of action, we’re still failing to understand them as fully human. Someone who is incapable of thinking for herself, and yet feels very much, is essentially a puppy.”

“Defining quality used to be easy, although taste was always a mitigating factor. Now in our multicultural society, it is more complex. No longer can we calibrate merit solely through a Eurocentric framework.”

Mary Schmidt Campbell: “It is a demonstrated fact that if you put well-designed arts programs into the schools – particularly in areas that are underserved – and you integrate them into the curriculum, you can raise the performance in reading, math and science. … It drives me crazy that we are still struggling to make that case around the country.”