Category: issues

Michael Kaiser: “Smaller organizations have a harder time developing the large transformational projects than larger organizations. That is why they tend to remain small. If they take the time to plan large, exciting programs four or five years in advance, they would be far more likely to find the resources they require to mount these programs.”

Says a teacher and researcher who has studied 30 years’ worth of GSCE/O-level and A-level coursework and tests, “while it is undeniably true that the exams have become easier and the marking more lax, there are other factors in play, such as the values we seek to impart through the curriculum and the consequences of opening up the study of English.”

“We may be at the bottom of the EU list when it comes to numbers of pupils learning a foreign language, but we are top of the EU list when it comes to the range of languages on offer in our schools.” And for adults, it’s “easier to learn a minority language” – from Czech to Turkish to Tamil – “in Britain than almost anywhere else.” (Well, except North America.)

“In the weeks since the rig explosion, parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville more than a century and a half ago have sometimes been striking – and painfully illuminating as the spill becomes a daily reminder of the limitations, even now, of man’s ability to harness nature for his needs.” (Not to mention that whaling was the oil industry of the 1800s.)

“[London mayor] Boris Johnson has announced that Veronica Wadley is to be the next London chair at Arts Council England. The appointment … [ends] one of the most hotly contested arts administration tussles in recent times.” Johnson tried to name Wadley to the post two years ago, but the appointment was vetoed by the national Labour government then in power.

“In one of the largest gifts to an arts or cultural organization in this area, the Tateuchi Foundation is giving $25 million toward the creation of a 2,000-seat performance center [and a 250-seat cabaret space] in downtown Bellevue.”

Low Kee Hong “is charged with bringing challenging works of art to a deeply conservative nation … And while his ideas include removing categories from the program – the shows are not, for example, divided into theatre, music, dance and so on – he … wants to create the must-see cultural event in Asia and to bring local audiences with him.”

“As the coalition sharpens its axe” for funding cuts, “let us remember that most of the world’s great works of art are the fruit of spendaholic patronage by magnificos who knew how to tell the accountants where to go.”

“The organisers of the [2012] Olympics believe” that the director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting “has the perfect credentials to mastermind an event that will have a live audience of about 80,000 and be seen by billions around the world on television.”

“Arguments that used to work on behalf of the arts no longer always do. And the arguments advocates are using instead all too often miss the point, by making roundabout claims that ignore what makes art appealing on a gut level.”