Category: issues

“This team of roughly 40 arts journalists, working with USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and ensconced in a second-floor office suite at Engine Co. No. 28, a converted firehouse-turned-restaurant on South Figueroa, won’t be battling blazes. They’ll be reporting on one of the largest concentrations of live theater ever to occur in Southern California.”

“The cabinet is ignoring arts council advice and will press ahead with the big bang approach to cutting spending on the arts … Ministers are due to decide at Friday afternoon’s cabinet meeting on how to cut just under 25% from the arts and culture budget.”

It’s the Arty Bollocks Generator. Here’s a sample of its work: “My work explores the relationship between new class identities and urban spaces. With influences as diverse as Derrida and John Cage, new synergies are crafted from both explicit and implicit textures…”

“[It’s] now possible to imagine a world in which every person creates his own mental fortress and apprehends the outside world through digital arrow-slits. But is this long-standing theoretical fear becoming an actual problem in our society?” Jacob Weisberg says no.

“Reputation has always been another form of income, and successful people have long found innumerable creative ways to monetize their time. Now a start-up called Expert Insight is trying to make the process far easier, enabling the more famous or distinguished among us to sell their expertise by the hour, from the comfort of their homes, while dressed in their pajamas.”

“The fact is that art is a communication between human beings, and to imagine the author as someone who once lived a flesh-and-blood existence may be fundamental to any serious reading of it. The alternative view, that art exists in Byzantine perfection beyond anecdote, smacks of sterile pretension.”

“After a two-year delay the Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved on Monday the plan to build the Museum of Tolerance in the city center.” A new design by Tel Aviv architects has replaced Frank Gehry’s original, rejected as too expensive. But many opponents, arguing that the selected site is a medieval Muslim cemetery, want the entire project stopped.

“Leipzig and Manchester offered an alternative model of what a great city might be at the height of empire. Neither a centre of government, nor a leafy refuge from dark satanic mills, they cultivated a life of the mind. … Both face progressive oblivion unless they can revive their particular city of the mind.” (And there are signs of hope.)

From an 1894 news article: “More numerous than the lunch wagon is the strolling salesman of ‘red hots.’ … [The immigrant vendor] carries a tank in which are swimming and sizzling hundreds of Frankforters or Wieners. These mysterious denizens of the steaming deep are sold for five cents, which modest charge includes an allowance of horseradish or some other tear-producing substance.”

“A huge row erupted in Britain this week over plans for a new private college that will charge £18,000 a year (nearly $30,000) for one-to-one Oxbridge-style tutorials and lectures from ‘celebrity professors.’ The New College of the Humanities, launched by Anthony Grayling, … aims to emulate the American liberal arts model and counter what he called the ‘crazy situation’ in English higher education.”