Category: issues

“For that angsty high schooler in your life, Walmart is now selling a bunch of Banksy knockoffs. Most ironically, one print is titled, Destroy Capitalism. Another print of a work by street artist Eddie Colla that Walmart mistook for a Banksy featured the words, ‘If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission.'”

“Once built, it was supposed to become an instant Crescent City tourist attraction. But there was a costly redesign required to preserve an existing historic building and then the usual spate of construction complications. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and later, a national economic downturn. But those troubles were surmountable. The real trouble was intrinsic; ArtWorks, like Marie Antoinette, was doomed by grandiosity.”

“We should preserve the apparatus of a game, but it’s impossible to save the culture of a game, which is really the most important part.”

“In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.”

“The idea of a city having responsibilities to its citizens larger than simply running basic services isn’t popular these days. The implications of this will seem to many socialist, and in Plato’s dialogue they become terrifyingly authoritarian. But the notion that the city has in its care our intellectual and even spiritual (though not necessarily religious) wellbeing is deeply embedded in our contemporary culture of museums, parks, libraries and education-even if people who believe this don’t feel comfortable simply saying it.”

“Paid internships, properly conceived and administered, could bring a diversity of region, class and race to an industry where the elevators are full of people who look alike, talk alike and think alike. Pie in the sky? Not at Atlantic Media.”

“Nearly half the money allocated at the council meeting last week in Los Angeles will go to Creative California Communities, a new grants program that’s patterned after two national grant-making efforts that use the arts to build a sense of community: Our Town, which is fully funded by the arts council’s federal equivalent, the National Endowment for the Arts, and ArtPlace America, which uses private funding.”

“A panel of three appellate judges will soon consider the appropriate standard for determining whether an unpaid intern qualifies as an employee as well as the proper standard for FLSA certification.”

“Philosophy remains the most male-dominated discipline in the humanities, both in its population and its combative methods. Instruction in philosophy often consists of being reprimanded for mistakes so small you need a magnifying glass to see them.”