Category: issues

“He thinks that the Arts Council is wasteful and will be looking for a significant cut in the amount it spends on administration. Such a cut looks like an easy win on paper, but how do you make informed investments and rigorously monitor them without specialist personnel overseeing the process?”

Here’s a list, as distributed by professors at Beloit College, of cultural references that students understand…

“The Age of Curation (see? anyone can coin a catchphrase) began long before today’s conversation about curated computing. In this Age of Digital Excess (oops, there I go again), we’re surrounded by too much music, too much software, too many websites, too many feeds, too many people, too many of their opinions and so on.”

Charlotte Higgins: “First of all, [Jeremy Hunt is] a nice man. Bright, thoughtful. Extremely personable. Amiable, in the way that those entitlement-complex-afflicted Etonian colleagues of his are often not. … He also ‘gets’ the arts – as in, he appreciates they are not some piece of luxurious add-on to British public life, but are essential to the lifeblood of the country … But what we can expect is blood on the floor.”

“Newly appointed culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has asked civil servants at the Department for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport to investigate how the department can make savings to cover £66 million of cuts.”

Michael Billington: “You don’t have to be an economic wizard to work out that subsidy is one of the best investments any government can make in British life. From an initially small outlay, we reap huge rewards. So why put down what is, to put it at its basest, a hugely productive cash-cow?”

“Naming rights have factored into many of Mr. Koch’s charitable gifts, and the industrialist has recently embarked on a campaign to ensure others will have similar naming opportunities available. Mr. Koch has imposed a legally binding expiration date on the naming rights attached to one of his biggest gifts, so that the rights eventually can be resold, he said.”

The deal “would relocate Continental’s headquarters to Chicago. Houston, which has been the airline’s home since 1982, fears the merger means a loss of jobs, prestige – and charitable contributions. Research … suggests this concern is well founded.”

Ryan Murphy calls an online piece about gay actors playing straight characters “as misguided as it is shocking and hurtful,” partly because the author “is himself gay. But what is the most shocking of all is that Newsweek went ahead and published such a blatantly homophobic article in the first place…and has remained silent in the face of ongoing (and justified) criticism.”

“[N]ewly published research suggests your grades may have been higher if that ink had been blue.”