Category: issues

“It’s a sort of retro-kitsch fantasia. If I understand him correctly, we have got to have ripped bodices at Hardwick Hall, discarded cod pieces, and stains on the four-poster like Tracey Emin’s bed. It’s a sort of vulgarity that would bring Walt Disney into discredit. It’s utterly infantile.”

“I and many other contemporary writers, musicians, visual artists, and copyleft lawyers are trying to think in new and different and (we believe) exciting ways about quotation, citation, appropriation, and plagiarism. We’re trying to regain the freedoms that writers for millennia took for granted but that we have lost.”

Said David Sefton, “It was done amicably, and by agreement. It was not going to be the program I was originally brought in to run … UCLA Live as I envisioned it was not going to be the model for the future. It’s not appropriate for me, and my response was to resign.”

“A successful boycott requires general consensus on two principles: one, that the cause is just, and two, that a boycott is an effective political tool. In the case of Israel, neither agreement yet exists.”

“Theatres and arts centres across the country are under threat of immediate cuts to their subsidies after Arts Council England was ordered to make £19 million of savings to its 2010/11 budget, with ACE warning it cannot guarantee funded organisations will be protected.”

“There is only one rule about the name: it shouldn’t be an unfortunate choice that sticks out its chin,” restaurant consultant Clark Wolf said. “Remember, they named a restaurant Vertigo on a higher floor of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Boy, did that go away fast.”

Hagia Sophia famously layers Islam over Byzantine Christianity, though its treasures were carted off by Crusaders, not Turks. Topkapi Palace, the seat of the Ottomans’ Islamic state, is just a short distance from the Military Museum, which looks at a millennium of Turkish history through the rigidly secular lens of Atatürk’s ideology. And so it goes …

“If you want to write, the best thing is to read whatever you can get your hands on – novels, poetry, literary as well as art criticism, theory, love letters, the backs of cornflakes packets, the writings of ferocious lunatics and great stylists alike.”

NEA chairman Rocco Landesman has “openly floated the notion of reinstating those individual artist fellowships. Despite the still-healing wounds of previous battles in the culture wars, leading arts administrators and thinkers around the country are talking about it too, emboldened by a relatively robust NEA budget and the passage of time.”

“Cultural organisations have begun their own paper exercises looking at 20% cuts in public funding, and a very likely fall in local authority support. Choices will have to be made. Since people are quite expensive to get rid of, programmes and building projects will be the first to suffer.”