Category: issues

Though historic Salvador do Bahía is 80% black, the city’s two main Carnaval circuits, now heavily commercialized media events, are largely white. This year, Salvador’s blocos afro (drumming groups-cum-social service organizations) are joining to campaign for their own new circuit and a purpose-built stadium.

“My worry is that what we have here is a brazen and wholesale government retreat from public policy backing for the arts and our creative industries.”

“It’s easy to be cynical about efforts to create a “culture” around a team of software developers. Team-building activities are notoriously hokey, and the notion of a “work hard, play hard” lifestyle has become so trite, it’s meaningless.”

Southern Methodist University “will compile public IRS information with current databases to create what they’re calling a census of American arts activity.”

“It’s called modestly, almost shyly, the Creative Employment Programme and its aim is to get is to 6,500 arts apprentices aged 16 to 24 in two years – in an industry that doesn’t have apprentices in its antecedents. It’s been an industry that prefers its young people to commit themselves with passion and enthusiasm for nothing.”

The Herero people got a particularly hard time from the Germans, who wiped out 80% of them and put the remainder in concentration camps. After the South Africans drove the Germans out in 1915, the Herero began wearing entertaining twists on the Germans’ clothing.

“Harriet Harman, the shadow culture secretary and deputy Labour leader, has intervened in the arts funding crisis in Newcastle to prevent the Labour council from cutting their culture and arts budget by 100%.”

“Merely because an organization exists in a specific geographic spot is not, to my thinking, a valid enough argument to convince me that they have some obligation to program for the residents of that spot.”

“In the last six months, a growing number of figures on the political right have been taking aim at our broken copyright system and offering some very sensible solutions.”

“‘When you get to my age, there’s a certain point at which you’re assumed to be dead,’ says Jonathan Miller, explaining why there has been a five-year gap between plays he has directed.”