Category: issues

Lyn Gardner looks forward to the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics – and thinks it could change the way able-bodied Britons think about art by the disabled.

“Five arts touring programs, including Playing Australia, that were previously administered through the government Office for the Arts will be transferred to the Australia Council … with its peer-review assessment procedures.” Also making the move will be a visual art funding scheme called Visual Arts and Craft Strategy.

“[There] are so many different starting points for discussion, and perspectives on those starting points, that it is fascinating to hear the disjointed interjections from the floor. Academics and policy advisers may have a common language for talking about topics such as cultural diplomacy, but politicians don’t appear to.”

“With another massive shutdown of the 405 freeway approaching, a grass-roots effort is underway to offer Angelenos an artistic reprieve that’s locally focused, timed for the second coming of Carmageddon, Sept. 29 and 30. More than 100 artists, arts organizations, advocacy groups and community partners have teamed to launch what they are calling Artmageddon, with the tagline ‘Less Car. More Art’.”

This week a debate at The Economist: “It is not the cost of funding that is the problem, but the cost to the arts themselves of government intervention. There is no ‘right’ form of art. The arts market is well-functioning–people tend to get what they want. That what they want is not what the elite want is a problem for the elite, not the people.”

“The British Museum’s global perspective offers dynamic juxtapositions between Shakespeare’s Britain and the world it was beginning to dream of colonising.”

“Of course everyone in America thinks that they’re middle class. But the only way that someone who makes $12,000 a year and someone who makes $200,000 a year can assume that they are all in the same social category is by never actually revealing what they make to each other.”

“New works may spring unassisted from a creator’s pen; often, though, they are ushered on stage via powerful and persuasive backers.”

Given that cities need its citizens more than ever, can the lessons of Burning Man’s Black Rock City, which pushes citizen participation to the limit, be applied to modern cities?

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“The Edinburgh Festival revolves around performers and shows. Without them, there is no festival. But there is another gravitational well about which the punters also orbit: the reviewers, and there are no shortage of them.”