Category: issues

“Pure art, which inevitably requires philanthropic support, remains a part of the Kimmel mission. But commercial acts are gaining an edge, fattening the Kimmel’s earned-revenue column. ‘We have 8,000 seats per night to entertain our community,’ says Kimmel president Anne Ewers.”

“[Tino Sehgal’s] pieces, like so much other participatory art under neoliberalism, serve a double agenda: offering a popular art of and for the people, while at the same time, reminding us that today we all experience a constant pressure to perform and, moreover, this is one in which we have no choice but to participate.”

“The museum, which counted artists among its most active founders, has always had them on its board. In a sense their loss was as shocking as anything that came before, because it signaled in the extreme a loss of faith on the part of artists. Mr. Deitch’s tenure as director has so far been a disappointment even to the people who thought it was a feasible idea in the first place.”

“Closing down and curtailing performances prevents people from different countries from exchanging ideas, songs, debating issues, and finding out what they have in common. This may well come to nothing more than enjoyment; I am not suggesting that the performance would be a political act of solidarity with others in trouble – that is too great a claim, but I am arguing that we see beyond borders in appreciating art, and in any future struggle for a better life. More art and more dialogue is always preferable to less.”

Turn the clock back exactly a half-century and you’ll find yourself in a different America–but one fraught with subtle signs and portents of what was to come. Nowhere is that lost world of confident certitude more clearly visible than in the surviving relics of its popular culture.

“[This was] the year when Bob Dylan cut his first album. Andy Warhol’s first solo show, an exhibition of Campbell’s Soup cans, opened in Los Angeles in 1962, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. As dissimilar as these now-venerable objets d’art may seem to us now, they all had in common the iron determination of their creators to break decisively with the earnest, self-confident tone of postwar culture.”

“The idea that elites congratulate themselves on their eclectic tastes, while not recognizing that they are class-determined, is thought-provoking and significant. The reality, however, is certainly at least a little more complicated; for one thing, you certainly don’t need to be painfully wealthy to have eclectic tastes.”

“Cuts to local government funding from Whitehall, coupled with the increasing cost to local councils of delivering adult social care and other statutory services, will mean that discretionary funding streams will have to be cut by 90% in cash terms to meet a projected £16.5 billion shortfall. Arts funding is one such discretionary stream.”

“This is the summer of stupid. … The jubilee was one big festival of refusing to think. … So is the Cultural Olympiad, with its high-class acrobats. Who really cares about [Elizabeth] Streb’s aerial choreography? It has no cultural depth at all. Nor do such highlights of the Olympic summer of culture as a bus balanced on top of a seaside pavilion or a poetry bombing.”

“Can the singers of grand opera forge a creative partnership with the improvisers of sketch comedy? The powers that be at both Lyric Opera of Chicago and The Second City are about to find out as they embark on a collaboration at the Civic Opera House.”