Category: issues

“It has the federal government increasing its commitment to traditional art forms, keeping the funding and management at arms-length, and making a creative investment of assisting those new sectors, such as the gaming industry, which have some extraordinary opportunities with the development of high-speed broadband.”

“A nation which can boast some of the great artists, arts companies and arts administrators of the world should not be self-conscious or embarrassed about embracing excellence as a core value of our cultural policy.”

Many patrons, especially the ones way up the hillside, are grateful to be able to see what’s happening on the faraway stage; others find the screens a garish, ham-fisted intrusion on a beautiful natural setting. “The objections are mostly being raised by people who attend classical concerts; there has been no sign of protest from, say, the Vampire Weekend crowd.”

“The national cultural policy, Creative Australia, stands as the most significant arts achievement. Launched by former arts minister Simon Crean in March, it is a pragmatic document, largely free of the national identity rhetoric … He was clearly frustrated at cabinet’s reluctance to back the cultural policy, and his forced departure from the arts ministry a week after its launch was dispiriting.”

In excerpts from her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, Fatima Bennoune visits a Pakistani director fighting to maintin a children’s theater festival despite actual bombings, the embattled producers of the wildly popular North African TV show Bled Musique (which one might describe as Algerian Bandstand), and the director of the controversial Lahore musical Burqavaganza.

“While there are flashes of great cultural programming, there is way less of it than a city of Boston’s size and talent deserves, especially at the neighborhood level. Boston spends a minuscule amount per capita on arts compared to similar cities. Our public art offerings are pathetic by comparison.”

“Spurred by demagogues, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kirill I, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russia has embraced a hysterical fear and loathing of gay people, embodied in a now-infamous law that prohibits gay “propaganda,” which seems to encompass any positive or even neutral mention of homosexuality that might be heard by children.”

“If you look past their soaring rhetoric, you’ll see globe-trotting university presidents and trustees who are defining down their expectations of what a liberal education means, much as corporations do when they look the other way at shoddy labor and environmental practices abroad. The difference, of course, is that a university’s mission is to question such arrangements, not to facilitate them.”

“A row in Mexico about the construction of museums of chocolate at Chichen Itza, the Mayan complex in the Yucatan peninsula that is a Unesco World Heritage site, and in nearby Uxmal, has revealed deep divisions within the National Institute of Archaeology and History and called into question the institute’ management of such sites.”

“It seems that we recognise talent far more easily when it’s accompanied by its occasional companion, success. When success enters the picture, talent pops right up, almost as if a red arrow has been drawn into the frame, leading the eye to where it’s meant to go. Without success, sometimes it’s hard to see talent for what it is.”