Category: issues

“Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions.”

“Melbourne Theatre Company, the Australian Ballet and Sydney Opera House last year started using dynamic pricing for selected shows. Sydney Theatre Company is likely to consider the idea after it upgrades its ticketing software next year, and Opera Australia is expected to reintroduce the system for its next season.”

Tony Hall, writing in The Telegraph: “The Cultural Olympiad is a four-year project to encourage people (especially the young) to become involved in arts and culture. It also aims to enable community-led projects to take place that wouldn’t have happened without the spur of the Games. … You may not live in London, sport may or may not be your thing, but this is a way you still get a chance to enjoy the celebrations.”

“The art of cruelty aestheticizes violence, in not necessarily scrupulous ways. It bludgeons audiences into getting the point. It’s responsible for a century of art-world Nurse Ratcheds, wielding jolts of aesthetic electroshock therapy and taking unseemly pleasure at rubbing people’s noses in pain.”

“These changes present the cultural sector with the opportunity to think beyond the artificial barriers that have been thrown up in the past between the arts, museums and libraries, and to take a fresh look at the role these institutions play in people’s lives.”

“This new generation comes home and they turn on their computer and they’re in three different windows and they’ve got three magazines open and they’re listening to iTunes and they’re texting with their friends, and they’re doing their homework.”

“Two acts at this weekend’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival have been denied entry into Canada. They include Tinariwen, an internationally renowned Malian collective that performed in Vancouver at the 2010 Cultural Olympiad; and U.S. banjo artist Morgan O’Kane.”

“If arts and creativity are crucial to the city’s evolving identity and economic growth, some local arts leaders question why the city eliminated the independent Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, or DOCA, in June, merging it into a new city agency known as Arts & Venues Denver.”

“Our superlatives are so bleached out. They have no force, no delight, no expressiveness–unless you add an intensifier, most of which are just as worn out: Really awesome.”

With so many pillars of Irish society – the Church, the banks, the Fianna Fail government, the “Celtic Tiger” mystique – having crumbled, the country’s artists are, as filmmaker Neil Jordan says, “the one element of Irish life that hadn’t let people down. We hadn’t betrayed people.” (And the new government knows it.)