On Thursday, Simon Crean, the veteran politician who introduced the comprehensive policy to general acclaim last week, led a sudden challenge to Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s leadership of the Australian Labor Party. When the coup failed, Gillard fired Crean from the ministry, and for now no one is certain of what will happen to the cultural plan Crean oversaw.
Category: issues
Do We Need Professional Critics When Amateurs Will Do It For Free?
“I don’t pretend to understand the fine points of movie, restaurant or theater reviewing. What I know about product reviews, however, suggests that readers will pay for information they consider valuable and that you do better than anyone else. User reviews–what real consumers focus on, gripe or rave about–can help inform that coverage.”
The Art Criticism Problem – Where’s The Innovation?
“In order for art criticism to become a strategic differentiator we must innovate. But it will take an enabling technology for criticism to become a strategic innovator or disruptor. Until then, creating new web-based media that appear to be critical but are actually commercial plugs for cities and businesses is not innovative.”
Fifteen Tips For Making Micro-Performance Work
The Guardian‘s Culture Professionals Network rounds up the best reminders and suggestions from its recent live chat on very-small-scale performance.
So Maybe The “Creative Class” Won’t Fix Cities
The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”
Covent Garden Taps Tate Gallery Exec To Be Next Chief
“Alex Beard, deputy director of the Tate, has been announced as the new chief executive of the Royal Opera House, succeeding Tony Hall who will become director general of the BBC next month.”
New Arts Council England Chief Says Culture Is Crucial For Regional Growth
“In his first speech as chair of Arts Council England, broadcaster Peter Bazalgette will say that the Heseltine plan for regional growth should centre on culture, and those pitching for money to ‘unlock the potential of their region’ ought to ‘put the arts at the hearts of their bid’.”
Revise Copyright Law? We Should Be Careful
“No one can doubt that creators in the U.S. have contributed a wealth of new ideas and expression — whether in the form of music, films, books, visual art or scholarly research — in the three decades since the last general revision of the Copyright Act. This is, in no small part, thanks to the fair and ethical treatment of authors and creators.”
Copyright Is Broken. We Should Fix It
“Copyright law is broken, and it needs to be tweaked. The duration for example, (70 years under the copyright extension act) is preposterous. So too, the big old gaping hole that doesn’t address the digital world.”
Do Artists Need Unions?
“Maybe unions or artists’ guilds can serve and protect an embattled creative class. With musicians typically operating without record labels, journalists increasingly working as freelancers as newspapers shed staff, and book publishing beginning what looks like a period of compression, unions might take some of the risk and sting out of our current state of creative destruction.”