Category: issues

“The strike-bound [sic] Minnesota Orchestra is all but dead. New York City Opera has filed for bankruptcy. I know, you’ve heard it before, but bear with me, OK? What we’re seeing here is not a string of isolated high-culture horror stories but something far more significant – something that requires a different kind of response.”

“Producers have welcomed the government’s decision to reform taxes for entertainers, meaning employers will no longer pay National Insurance contributions, calling the move a ‘relief'” that could free up more money to be spent on presenting work.

The study concludes by stating that there’s likely a strong correlation between training in the arts and success as a scientist or engineer–success that can be “measured in economically valuable products such as patentable inventions and the founding of new companies.”

“The sessions, to be held in Glasgow, Langholm and Inverness on November 22, 23 and 25, will give arts professionals the opportunity to quiz new chief executive Janet Archer and her deputy Iain Munro on their thinking behind the plan and their approach to funding. After Archer and Munro have set out the work in progress, there will be time for comment, discussion and debate.”

Oh, by about 1300%, to judge from the sale price of empty office buildings in 1993 (the year the Avenue was launched) and this year.

“Philadelphia has opened most of the new concert halls, theaters, and other arts spaces it set out to build in the culture boom of the past two decades. Now, who pays the piper?”

Inga Saffron: “The challenge today isn’t to cajole suburbanites to come downtown for an evening; it’s making the city more livable for the thousands of new residents who are putting down roots in Philadelphia’s reviving neighborhoods. No one anticipated that population surge when the avenue was created.”

“Net neutrality is a dead man walking. The execution date isn’t set, but it could be days, or months (at best). And since net neutrality is the principle forbidding huge telecommunications companies from treating users, websites, or apps differently — say, by letting some work better than others over their pipes — the dead man walking isn’t some abstract or far-removed principle just for wonks: It affects the internet as we all know it.”

“My short answer is the recession is over for us pretty much the same way it is over for most other sectors. Things are better than one to three years ago, but not back to pre-recession.”

“The main reason boycotting Ender’s Game is counterproductive is that the theme of the story itself is the best repudiation of everything for which Card has come to stand.”