Category: issues

“I don’t work in the creative industries, in fact, I don’t work in the arts. What I do is I help people live longer, feel safer, be happier and I use art to achieve that. That’s why I will never retire – what I do is a vocation, not a job.”

“More than hearts may be torn if the city gives the go-ahead to the titanic and controversial £5.5bn Liverpool Waters project proposed by property developers Peel Holdings. Unesco is so angry with what its inspectors have seen of the designs that it has threatened – and not for the first time – to strip Liverpool’s city centre of its World Heritage Site status.”

“Last month, as Italy’s new technocratic government struggled to its feet, 100 financiers, entrepreneurs, collectors, curators, dealers and academics gathered at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence for a private conference on the future of art and finance.”

“Most striking is the lack of a United States cultural center in Beijing. The Beijing American Center, an office for educational exchanges, has no significant Internet presence and no publicly available schedule of events. The most recent event posted in Chinese is a four-year-old movie festival.”

The Google Cultural Institute plans to make artifacts like the scrolls — from museums, archives, universities and other collections around the world — accessible to any Internet user. ‘We’re building services and tools that help people get culture online, help people preserve it online, promote it online and eventually even create it online’.”

“A study just published in the journal Poetics suggests art forms such as literature and classical music ‘are becoming increasingly more irrelevant for most students’ cultural lives.’ This points to ‘an increasingly precarious position for traditional highbrow culture’.”

“In a nook of the library at Baghdad University, sturdy histories of the American Revolution and the Vietnam War line up next to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Updike. Paperbacks from Tom Clancy and Michael Connelly, even Judy Blume, dangle guilty pleasures. … Yet, the readers never come.”

“I think that what they did with the theater is simply vandalism. … Nikita Shangin is an unfortunate architect who created the plan of the Bolshoi Theater, I feel very sorry for him. He just does not understand what he has done. He does not even know what a crime he had committed, that he will be cursed by more than one generation.”

“The unwillingness to engage, to risk argument, to risk fun is everywhere. Conform or shut up is the theme. What happens in these circumstances is a withdrawal to the bland and innocuous.”

“After a multiyear, $70 million reconstruction, the New York Historical Society has been transformed from a fusty attic into an intellectual powerhouse.”