Category: issues

“Geneva’s counterculture may not be dead, but it is looking distinctly bruised. The city, known internationally for diplomacy, private banking, watches and highbrow culture, was for much of the last decade a hub for squatters, anarchists, electronic music and impromptu theater. But recent years have not been kind to the alternative-culture scene.”

“Liverpool City Council has published budget proposals that will see it reduce its arts funding by £1.8 million … The cuts translate to 20% reduction in funding to the city’s main arts organisations,” including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Everyman and Playhouse theatres, and the Liverpool Performing Arts Festival.

“Saadiyat [Island] is more than a tourist initiative. … The cultural district project aims to redefine and reposition Abu Dhabi’s place in the world, and it will also force us to think in a new way about the Middle East. Can a region that has become a watchword, in Western circles, for intransigent problems and violence once more become an energizing cultural force?”

“Such an overreaching concept of intellectual property obstructs the exchange of ideas, the referencing and reworking of earlier works that stimulate invention. For Hollywood to thwart this by appropriating our common cultural legacy is as ethically dubious as plagiarism — innovation, perhaps, but not actual progress. Like 3-D.”

“The more arts and crafts experience our scientists and inventors have, the more likely they will be to generate creative capital of clear economic value. Invest in arts and crafts and it comes back to you many-fold.”

“Rahm Emanuel and Carol Moseley Braun want Chicago to create a new cultural plan. Miguel del Valle believes the Loop theater district does not need new tax incentives. Gery Chico says Chicago must find a way to expand library hours.”

The council “is on the verge of cutting its culture budget by £326,000 over the next two years. The local authority also plans to adopt a ‘more rigorous approach’ … Theatres and other cultural institutions will now have to prove that they are delivering the council’s priorities in order to secure funding.”

“I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines – which, if Hollywood is to believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, … I wasn’t the hero at all. I was the villain.”

“NEA supporters tend to trumpet the museums and orchestras, but most of the larger institutions that benefit from the grants don’t depend on them. Smaller programs — the ones that support America’s children — need this money to survive.”

Richard Eyre: “And little by little the already large gap between those for whom the arts are a part of life and those who feel excluded from them will widen to an unbridgeable divide. The result: cultural apartheid.”