Category: issues

“Over the past six years, TRG – a Colorado-based consulting firm – has become as big a talking point for Canadian performing-arts administrators as pollster Nate Silver’s similarly data-driven methods were to political junkies in the recent U.S. election. … At least 15 major theatres, opera and ballet companies … have bought into the group’s dispassionate data analysis” – with impressive results.

“The current project-based funding system means that many of Scotland’s independent performing artists are prevented from fulfilling their creative potential either because they are distracted by the amount of administration and company management required of them between projects, or because they are unable to secure the long-term services of an experienced producer – or both.”

While most of Portugal’s arts sector has been reeling from a 30% cut in government funding, Guimarães, one of two European Capitals of Culture for 2012, has used the special EU funding to develop a lively arts scene almost from scratch – and to renovate and repopulate shuttered industrial areas.

“The arts cannot address social problems directly. And nor should they be asked to. The problems of education, justice, and health are for the politicians to tackle, and it is damaging when they ask culture to do it for them.”

“We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average, according to economic historian Zorina Kahn. The rate of patent litigation was twice what it is today compared to some decades in the mid-19th century.”

“The American division is not essentially about partisan politics or ideological labels, and it can only sometimes be reduced to questions of economic policy. It is sometimes but not always about racial resentment, sometimes but not always about the contested public role of Christianity, and often but not always about big words that are inherently squashy and subjective.”

“Since Mr. Hamdard had sold mostly to foreigners, who were usually just passing through, he was little known and recognized in his own country, said Mr. Khosravi, who now manages to keep his Bamiyan Gallery open only by subsidizing it with a travel agency business. ‘His work has gone to the four winds, that’s the problem,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan, people don’t care about art.'”

What if a journalist writes a thought-provoking, well-supported, fact-checked, fascinating story that turns the world as we know it on its head – and the central premise is utterly wrong?

“You’ve sensed that your pop stars are bit more likeable than usual, your Hollywood hunks seem more polite and your hipster literary icons more self-deprecating. Don’t panic. Just let the Canadian cultural invasion take you in, caress you with its be-mittened hands, and soothe you as it sings…”