Category: issues

“Mom-and-Pop roadside attractions are struggling for their meager share of the tourist dollar. They suffer from a weak economy, changes in travel habits and kids unlikely to be wowed by stationary dinos and miniature golf after watching Avatar in 3-D or slashing their siblings with Wii swords.”

“Tracking doctoral students by the beginning dates of their programs, the authors of one study in the book trace the startling increase in the share of Ph.D. candidates from abroad, from 29% for the cohort beginning study in 1980 to 49% in the 1996 cohort.”

“The three-week long arts festival sold 1,955,913 tickets, up more than 5% on last year. Festival organisers calculated that there were 40,254 performances of 2,453 shows in 259 venues across the city.”

Camille Paglia: “The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.”

For a performance last week in San Francisco, the folk-rock legend “asked his fans to line up outside the venue for a few hours with $60 cash in hand to get inside – eschewing extra fees, printer errors and scalper markups.” How did it work? Only okay …

“Almost every city that does this gets into trouble one way or another because they can’t figure out how to stop spending money. Athens thought they’d spend around $5 billion on the 2004 Games and ended up spending around $18 billion. London thought they were going to spend ($5 billion), and they’re somewhere around $20 billion or more with two years to go.”

“In terms of media and entertainment, America hasn’t felt this thoroughly permeated by products, characters, ideas and modes of behavior that originated across the Atlantic since the British Invasion of the 1960s. In short, we’re witnessing a distinctly British moment in American culture.”

“In Japan manga is a mainstream medium, with sales of magazines and books amounting to around $5 billion a year. They are increasingly popular abroad and starting to make their way into museum exhibitions–though in Japan itself they are still given short shrift as an art form.”

“Over the last four years the Getty Conservation Institute … has built an ambitious Web-based system that will allow archaeologists and conservators there, for the first time, to gain access to decades’ worth of records about Jordan’s sites and to monitor the condition of those sites much more easily.”

Says one theatre director, “We exercise a social function with our art. But we also offer an excellent return on public funding.” Says another, “The lion’s share of Arts Council funding goes towards supporting organisations that it has always been supporting, and, as a result, the same things are done again and again.”