Category: issues

“In 2011, for the first time, private donations to Australia’s 28 major performing arts companies outstripped corporate sponsorship, making up 53 per cent of the $65 million of non-government funding attracted to the sector. While philanthropy has risen over the past decade corporate sponsorship and government funding has stalled.”

“Using artists as cheap work-for-hire is a common theme among many of these large well-intention idea-focused organizations. They want to contribute to solving seemingly intractable problems and they acknowledge that sometimes people within the fields where those problems are happening are a bit too tied to existing ways of thinking, plus they have a general admiration for artists as creative thinkers, so they say, let’s bring in an artist to help us solve our problem.”

“When gossip is recorded we start to obtain details of personalities, choices, quirks, likes and dislikes, the weird and the dull traits that make up an individual. Paradoxically, the more trivial and ephemeral reports of our ancestors became, the more seriously we could think about them.”

“Squinny-eyed merchants squeezed their likenesses on to the wings of altarpieces they had paid for. Aisle chapels were as likely to be named after the bankers who had financed their decoration as after the saints to whom they were dedicated or the mere artisans who had frescoed them.”

‘Why can’t a 15-year-old like Wagner? Why can’t grandad keep up with the latest trends in drum’n’bass? To expect the aesthetic preferences of the generations to have impermeable walls around them is to have frustratingly low expectations of what people are capable of.”

“The presence of the arts in a neighborhood makes that neighborhood safer, if only because kids spend more time out of a bullet’s way. “

“UNESCO, like most other UN agencies, suffers from a house culture which prefers to deal with governments, and lives happily with the fiction that governments genuinely care about citizens and their heritage. If that were true, then the problem of protecting patrimony could simply be solved by telling governments to pass good laws and enforce them.”

“New evidence from caves in Oregon may finally put to rest the long-held theory that the early people who made Clovis spear points were the first inhabitants of North America. … The new finds provide strong support for growing genetic evidence that indicates the Americas were populated in at least three waves of immigration beginning at least 15,000 years ago.”

Artists in Tunis still feel under threat following protests by hundreds of hard-line Salafi Islamists last month against a number of works shown at the Printemps des Arts contemporary art fair.

Haley criticized the amount of overhead in the agency’s budget, with 30 percent of the funds dedicated to administration, personnel, and operating expenses. “Who would donate to a charity that spent that much money on overhead?” Haley asked. “Instead of taking a command-and-control approach to promoting the arts, we would be better off returning these funds to the public, to let them decide for themselves what artistic endeavors deserve financial support.”