Category: issues

“The rebuilding of Port-au-Prince won’t start for years, yet there’s already hope it will herald a brighter future for the Caribbean capital. What, asks Rob Sharp, can we learn from the architectural reinvention of other ruined cities?”

“The Senate Appropriations Committee restored the $890,735 that the governor had recommended for [the Georgia Council for the Arts], but the House had cut out. The Senate version of the budget keeps the agency going, but with about $1.6 million less in state backing than it has in fiscal year 2010.” Even so, the funding isn’t a sure thing.

Proposed “legislation is supposedly designed to boost California’s high school graduation rates. It would allow students to replace the current requirement for a course in visual or performing arts or foreign language with one in career technical education.”

With the academic job market withering, more and more humanities graduate students must look for work in the outside world. Alas, the demeanor of young scholars is sometimes too … let’s say, cerebral for a successful job interview. So one grad school dean has started an improv program to get her charges more comfortable with things like eye contact.

It was “the largest decline ever tracked by the Foundation Center. Grants made by the nation’s 75,000 foundations fell to $42.9 billion from $46.8 billion in 2008. The drop is a huge contrast to giving in 2008, when grants actually rose by about 2.8% over 2007 levels.”

“Having lived in Atlanta for 14 years until returning home to Manhattan three years ago, I can attest to Georgia’s guiding Red Neck mentality: ‘the arts promote imagination and creativity and are therefore bad for our children, especially with all those homosexuals in high places.'”

“I have to say that I tweet, partly for the reasons that many people involved in the arts do – we’re tired of being isolated from our audience, tired of being misrepresented and having what we love both mystified and over-simplified in ways that help no one except those who seek to make themselves necessary as intermediaries. On Twitter I get what I used to from good arts broadcasting.”

“If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in comic books,” says Del Col, a clean-cut young businessman who has attended the Stratford Shakespeare Festival religiously every year of his adult life. “He’d be in films, he’d be in TV, he’d be in mobile content, he’d be in video games. He’d be James Cameron, basically.”

“It’s a widening realization, I think, that globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie.”

“What hasn’t been bandied about very much are terms such as “cultural sovereignty” and “national identity” – political vocabulary that to some ears sounds anathematic in 2010. Yet now might be exactly the time for that discussion.”