Category: issues

“People keep praising the film’s ‘realistic’ depiction of slum life in India. But it’s no such thing… Most people in the slums never achieve a fairy-tale ending. […] [M]ost slum dwellers never escape. Neither do their kids. No one wants to watch a movie about that.” Suzip Mazumdar recalls what life was like in the Indian ghetto.

“An omnibus bill for the current fiscal year introduced on Monday by the House Appropriations Committee includes $10 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which would bring each of their annual budgets to $155 million.”

“With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. … This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, ‘what it means to be a human being.'”

The “infusion of the arts into the Obamas’ public rituals and family routines comes after eight years in which George W. Bush seldom was seen in Washington’s halls of culture. Laura Bush liked to attend performances and museum exhibitions, Washington arts leaders say, but such patronage wasn’t a couples activity. Taking the Obama past as prelude, there’s a fair amount of evidence to support arts partisans’ hopes for a White House attuned to music, theater, fine arts and dance.”

“The auction is a travesty for many Indians, for whom Gandhi is a godlike figure, and some in India’s Parliament have called for the government to either stop the auction or put in the highest bid to get back the nation’s iconic mementos.” Items include the Mahatma’s sandals, pocket watch, brass bowl and his trademark round spectacles.

“[T]he Pennsylvania Ballet is not alone in lusting after online social-network users. The Kimmel Center has a Flickr photostream. The Curtis Institute of Music is on LinkedIn. The Arden Theatre and the Franklin Institute use Twitter. The Philadelphia Orchestra has a MySpace page. … The Philadelphia fine-arts scene has gone viral, and no one is hiding the reason.” That reason, in a phrase? Young audiences.

What is known so far is that 40 percent of the stimulus money for the arts will go to state arts agencies and the country’s six regional arts agencies, including the Western States Arts Federation. They will then redistribute those allocations via their existing funding channels.

“A 17-year veteran of the Edinburgh festivals, Kath Mainland started her career with the EFF in 1991 as an administrative assistant, before becoming a freelance festivals and events producer for eight years. During that time she was involved in many of Scotland’s leading festivals and events, and spent time as general manager of Assembly Theatre, one the major Edinburgh Fringe producers.”

“Creative types come to New York to exchange ideas with like-minded people, but also to have the mass media spread their work. What happens when websites such as Pitchfork (started by a Minneapolis kid in his bedroom) can do much more for a band’s fortunes than Rolling Stone? What happens when fashionistas listen more to blogs than they do to Vogue?”

“The conflict between the American myth of a classless society and the reality of the nation’s deepening caste divisions was the irony at the core of some of the greatest literary works of the 1920s.