Category: issues

In addition to theatre critic John Moore, Kyle MacMillan has also taken a buyout. This is a huge blow to arts coverage in Denver.

“The NEA announced Wednesday it will lead a new task force of federal departments to examine and encourage research on the impact of the arts at all stages of life.”

“The Heritage department has eliminated 400 jobs, and the savings from those salaries mean more money has gone directly to artists and less is spent on the bureaucracy in Ottawa.”

“[A] message sent between a computer in Hamburg to one in Dusseldorf could wind up on a server in California, while its response might end up in Mumbai. This is why the cloud confounds the issue of data sovereignty – it’s hard to say which nation or jurisdiction rules over data at any one time.”

“The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop.”

The cafeteria at the retailer’s Shanghai outlet has become a hot meeting spot for elderly singles, who guzzle free coffee and bring their own food. “And older folks aren’t the only troublemakers. Young people, often with kids in tow, plop on chairs to watch videos on their smartphones. People aren’t shy about kicking off their shoes and tucking into display beds for a nap.”

“At a time of particularly vicious cuts to university arts and humanities funding, the cynical deployment of artists – whose main contribution to culture resembles nothing so much as the invention of a brand – is insulting. Rather than comply with such nonsense, artists should mobilise themselves against profiteering beneficiaries of the Olympics, not take on the role of quiescent performing dogs.”

The document outlines the legal obligations for arts and cultural organisations offering internships, as well as highlighting best practice. In addition to paying interns a wage, it recommends that companies offer an “open, transparent and fair” recruitment process and give interns “meaningful experiences and responsibilities that contribute to the aims of the organisation”.

“Using noninvasive technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and geophysical imaging, a team from the University of Birmingham’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, known as VISTA, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna, discovered evidence of two huge pits positioned on a celestial alignment at Stonehenge.”

For a government report on arts philanthropy, Australian Ballet executive director Valerie Wilder – who has worked in both the US and Canada – specifically recommended following the Canadian system of mixing direct state funding with matching grants and tax incentives for philanthropy.