Category: issues

“A majority of Americans (57 percent) believe that the higher education system in the country fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend, according to a survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center.”

“The question is, will all that giving, by the billionaires and the thousands more Americans with far smaller amounts of money, actually do any good? There is rather a depressing history of well-intentioned donations often doing nothing to alleviate society’s problems, and sometimes even making matters worse.”

“The British aversion to the I-word seems to be at odds with the facts. This country has an impressive array of lively, creative and argumentative minds. And if you doubt that, just watch them take this thesis to pieces.”

“There are millions like me: people over 50, professional credentials (and achievements), working as ‘consultants’ and not earning a penny, living on savings, trying to re-train. … When you include us, the actual number of unemployed in America is closer to 20% than 9%. Now, that number is eye-popping. So why do writers and artists seem uninterested in the human toll of this terrifying downturn?”

“Encouraged and empowered by their success in delivering a smooth Olympic games, China’s security apparatus has steadily expanded. The budget for security is more than 50 per cent higher than it was during 2008, the year of the games, and has now even outstripped the budget of the People’s Liberation Army. Against this backdrop, Ai Weiwei is perhaps the party’s biggest scalp. While his protests have become steadily more electric over the past few years, few expected that any action would be taken against him.”

Rep. Jeff Flake (R – AZ) questioned NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman over a number of grants, including those to an international accordion festival and to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Making grants like these “feeds the cynicism out there about everything we do,” Flake said.

“Great art is made from a great paradox: it is grounded in the local, the specific, the ephemeral, yet it achieves the metaphysical and cheats time and place. The floating world of international co-productions and festival art doesn’t allow for that local starting place: work is being made in the first place (sometimes literally, often metaphorically) in the business lounge. And the audience who come increasingly expect that floating, international world of luxury.”

“Among children of a college graduate, 27% said they had never taken even one arts class, compared with 12% in 1982. For children of high school graduates, the number who’d never had any arts study rose from 30% nearly 30 years ago to 66% in 2008.”

Construction is now beginning on the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, a two-theater complex (1,750 and 230 seats) to be built behind the façade of the city’s 1926 Municipal Auditorium.

“But in a time of economic stringency, it is too much to expect a state that must provide hospital beds, school places, police and soldiers to pay for dance ensembles, theatre groups and ‘community projects’,” write Simon Heffer. What’s more, he says, “[too] many second-rate ‘artists’ – be they screenwriters, directors, choreographers, ‘installation artists’ or composers – were enabled to make a living purely because the state chose to subsidise their profoundly second-rate outpourings.”