Category: issues

“As the recession takes its toll on big-box retailers, more communities across the country are having to confront not just the eyesore of giant empty stores, but also the loss of jobs and tax revenue that follow. Many are trying to find creative uses for those near windowless monoliths.”

After decades of immigration, “what does it mean to be English and who gets to call themselves English? JB Priestley assumed that anyone who came here would buy into certain things – Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on. He had not envisaged that there would be people who would look beyond these shores for their identity, and he would have had great difficulty grappling with the notion that some people’s identity would be bound up in religion.”

“A survey of corporate and private philanthropy to Australia’s 28 major performing arts companies reveals that in 2008 individual support through bequests, gifts of money and prescribed private funds had increased from 2004 by 119 per cent to $20 million.”

“[T]he professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris. The pyrotechnician – and, more importantly, his patron – intends to ornament the night sky beyond the powers of God himself. … Fireworks are imperialist and, as we used to say in school, hegemonic. That they are popularly believed to be populist entertainment does not say much for the populace.”

“[W]hether our virtual virtuousness will result in real-world action is unpredictable, and has as much to do with human nature as it does with amassing enough numbers. This is the problem with activism born of social networking sites. … Do our Facebook groups — which are today often treated as the official barometer for a cause’s importance; more members must signify more gravitas — ever translate into significant change?”

Anne Midgette: “The role of a critic is to cover a field. This doesn’t mean simply pandering to popular taste. It means doing one’s best to convey a sense of what is going on in a given discipline by writing about every possible side of it. It means trying to convey a perspective that a reader who doesn’t spend every night going to concerts/plays/films may not be able to gather himself; or offering a thoughtful take that might stimulate a reader who does go to everything to see something in a different light.”

“The critics spoke last Friday. ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ is a Hindenberg of a movie. The audience responded: So freakin’ what? They forked over $215 million (and counting) to see the widely panned sequel about shape-shifting robots.” So Post critics in film, theatre, books, TV and pop music consider the question: Do their judgments matter? (Book critic Ron Charles: “When I want to feel more relevant, I lie and say I’m a haberdasher.”)

“Ticketmaster unit TicketsNow has agreed to curb deceptive tactics and pay $50,000 for consumer-fraud enforcement and education in an agreement with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan after her investigation into the unit’s marketing practices. … As part of the deal with Ms. Madigan’s office, TicketsNow will stop operating Web sites that have misleading domain names or other deceptive tactics.”

“Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser will meet with arts leaders in all 50 states and Puerto Rico over the next year, he said, beginning with visits to New York, Kalamazoo, Mich., Indianapolis and six other cities in the next two months. Since February, the center’s ‘Arts in Crisis’ initiative [www.artsincrisis.org] has offered emergency planning advice for fundraising, budgeting, marketing or other strategies as box office revenues decline, along with donations and endowment income.”

“The Troy-based Kresge Foundation today announced $450,000 in grants to 18 local visual artists. The $25,000 no-strings fellowships, which inaugurate one of the country’s most lucrative annual awards available to artists, are designed to give winners financial breathing room to allow them to focus on making art.” The foundation’s president “said that Kresge’s grants in 2010 would recognize performing and literary artists.”