Category: issues

Your correspondent goes to New York’s High Line for a 50th anniversary performance, on Earth Day, of Fluxus artist Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad.

“Emails released by News Corporation to the Leveson Inquiry on the culture, practice and ethics of the press appeared to show that [minister Jeremy] Hunt’s office gave the media organisation confidential information about its planned takeover of BSkyB.”

“We’re shopping on the internet. Recession is killing the big chains. So what should we do with the streets that were once the heart of our communities?”

“Artists’ copyright is frequently misunderstood. Even if a painting (or drawing or photograph) has been sold to a collector or a museum, in general, the artist or his heirs retain control of the original image for 70 years after the artist’s death. Think of a novel. You may own a book, but you don’t own the writer’s words; they remain the intellectual property of the author for a time.”

“Called Turnaround Arts, the program aims to improve academic performance and increase student engagement through the arts. It was developed by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in cooperation with the Education Department and the White House Domestic Policy Council.”

“Everyone knows that half of all advertising dollars are wasted. And everyone knows that the Internet fixes that, because digital advertisers can spend money getting their messages to the people they want to reach. Except that’s not true at all: The Web offers advertisers a slew of creepily effective targeting mechanisms, but they only work for some stuff, some of the time.”

“I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that no-one produces anymore cultural artefacts that are ‘difficult’ in this sense – of course they do – it’s just that these works are no longer regarded as the desiderata that any well-cultivated person aspires to an appreciation of. Rather, ‘difficult’ works are parcelled off, and the great plurality and ubiquity of our media means that their specialist audience can be readily catered to.”

“When Mubarak fell in February 2011, artists like Salama hoped that stories that had long been kept under wraps could now blossom and a citizenry that had been lapping up fluff might turn to more substantive fare. But as with many of the country’s political changes these shifts have happened unevenly as each entertainment realm has made progress at its own, sometimes turtle-like pace.”

“The Pirate Party has laid claim to another first: It’s the first left-wing party to have a considerable number of intellectuals not for, but against it.”