Category: issues

“A lawsuit has been filed against New York City and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts accusing them of limiting public access to Damrosch Park by using it for commercial purposes, including Fashion Week, for as many as 10 months of the year.”

A record-breaking annual spend of almost £7 billion on the National Lottery’s portfolio of games saw donations to the arts growing to £390 million in the year to the end of March.

“An unintended consequence of the Islamist occupation of the city has been a renewed global focus on the priceless manuscripts, which although mostly written in Arabic also include centuries-old writings in Greek, Latin, French, English and German. But while the Ahmed Baba Institute is painstakingly working to preserve preserving this history, other manuscripts in Timbuktu are faring less well.”

Co-founder Samina Ali: “The impression many have of Muslim women is that they have no voice, no freedom – not even a face because they move around behind burqas! … We wanted to help reverse the stereotypes and the best way to do that seemed to present Muslim women speaking to the complex realities of their own lives, through interviews and art.”

“You could imagine autocratic regimes or other communities taking advantage of that, creating a scenario in which one group finds a way to, for example, filter another group’s content from the web. Or to shut down — or severely slow down — their Internet access.”

“‘There are so many things that we’ve been deceived over,’ he said, waving toward books on the devastating famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, an episode that official histories have muffled in euphemisms. ‘We can’t learn the truth, so black becomes white and white becomes black.'”

“You still have the same three white males who are going to make that decision. If you keep doing the same thing, you’re going to get pretty near the same outcome.”

“Williams and Tsien’s physically small (a mere forty feet wide and eighty-five feet high) but architecturally powerful incursion into MoMA’s presumed turf has long been known to be a thorn in the side of Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern’s director since 1995.”

“It’s a city of a lot of things hidden and because of neglect and a general feeling of apathy over the last 50 years of military rule and dictatorship and oppression and a general feeling of not valuing your own self as individuals and also of society,” he says. “So the city is abandoned.”

“The Kennedy Center hopes to bring greater transparency to a selection process that has been largely opaque in past years. Last year, some national Hispanic advocacy groups criticized the Honors’ selection process after noting that only two of the 186 honorees since 1978 were Hispanic.”