Category: issues

“[The city’s] sense of itself, its urbanism and its collective spirit, can also be a trap. There’s always the rest of the world to think about. A living culture has always depended on openness, reciprocity and exchange. The almost shocking individuality … of Gaudí’s architecture … was also only possible because of a wider international culture.”

The artistic manifesto championed by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg “wasn’t just a watershed for film, though. It was a watershed for all of Denmark, and one that would come to embody its cultural renaissance. … Dogme, I discovered, had even sparked a renaissance in Danish cooking.”

“According to those first results, the $35 addition to the income tax or Portland residents above the federal poverty line was winning and winning big, getting a little more than 58 percent of the total vote in the reported returns.”

“Online privacy is a serious issue — every day we turn more of our personal information over to the cloud with little assurances that it will remain safe from companies and governments. But every time the media points to smoke without fire, the greater the chance we will tune out genuine privacy threats.”

“The result may well be a cultural apartheid, in which Londoners enjoy a plethora of arts activities and those living elsewhere lose nearly all access to culture, with its ability to transform lives and open doors. The councils will have saved money in the short term, but we may never be able to measure the enormity of what has been lost.”

“Herta Mueller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, says the choice to give this year’s award to Mo Yan is a ‘catastrophe’ that never should have happened, and accuses the Chinese writer of praising the Asian country’s tough censorship laws.”

“You now have a tug-of-war to decide who controls the iconography of Tolkien’s masterworks and their place in our society. On the one side you have the estate of the original creator and the publisher of his works. On the other side, there is the company behind one of the largest film franchises in history.”

“The move would save £1.5m and comes as the council is reducing services and cutting 1,300 jobs to save £90m a year. The council is also proposing to shut 10 libraries under its plans, which would be phased in over three years.”

“My intention has always been to serve one term … The time has come for me to become a cliché: I turned 65, am going to retire, and cannot wait to spend more time in Miami Beach.”

“Was arts subsidy, pondered the report, really just supporting the tastes of the upper and middle classes? Have institutions such as the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera succeeded in attracting any but the privileged few?”