Category: issues

“A generation used to last 25 years or so. It was defined by shared experiences, including wars, presidents, music, movies, or various inventions. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says generations are now changing every few years as new technology creates substantially different experiences.”

“There are now 30 arts festivals that take place in Oakland, up from 2 in the mid-’80s, and about 50 art galleries where there were only a handful a decade ago. Industrial-arts organizations like the Crucible, founded in 1999, have been instrumental in supplying the Burning Man Festival with eye-popping installations.”

“Gone are Mickey and his friends. In their place are about 600 custodians, painters, gardeners and decorators, working to ensure that the 85-acre park meets the squeaky-clean ideals that Walt Disney himself extolled even before he launched the park 55 years ago.”

“A downtown fire station will be demolished today to make way for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, a long-awaited first step delayed for months while the city cemented a financing plan. Organizers behind the ambitious arts center also will announce today that another donor has stepped up and given $1 million to help finance the project.”

“With individual giving and traditional corporate philanthropy drying up, museum leaders hatched an ambitious plan to create new sources of earned revenue, from boosting ticket income to lassoing corporate sponsorship.” The museum’s workshop “has generated millions of dollars building exhibits sponsored by companies such as U.S. Steel, Marathon Oil and the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis.”

“Some of the new money [earned by the museum’s exhibit-building workshop] is coming from [client] companies’ marketing budgets, an arrangement that implies a cozier relationship than traditional philanthropy. The danger is that the museum might subtly skew the science to satisfy a sponsor’s message.”

“Staff at Glasgow cultural venues, including the Tramway and Glasgow City Halls, are set to go on strike on Friday after voting to take action over what they describe as attacks on pay and conditions by the parent company which operates the sites.”

“My purpose in having coffee with Jeremy Hunt, the personable young shadow culture secretary, was to obtain reassurance, not least because mention of the arts, culture and broadcasting is entirely omitted from the 118-page Conservative party manifesto. Hunt sees nothing sinister in this.”

“There is complicity between globalisation and individualism; we can all watch any film, read any book, wherever made or written, and have the same experience. What a turn-off to be reminded that in fact we need an expert to mediate; what the Chinese get is a mediated version of me; what I’m reading is a mediated Dostoevsky.”