Category: issues

Says Rem Koolhaas, when it comes to working in China: “‘a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental – that it is egotistical to think that the government cares what you, as an architect, think about its human-rights or environmental record and might change its policies accordingly.”

“A peasant-labour force of 1.3m has worked on 7,000-odd giant construction sites that have killed, in a hushed-up way, between 2,000 and 3,000 migrant workers a year. As for the city’s residents, Beijing’s average life expectancy is now well below the national average, thanks to smog and urban stress. So much for the promised clean, green ‘People’s Olympics’.”

It’s about culture in the end. In its escalating dysfunction Belgium demonstrates the inextricable link between culture and nationhood.

“The mega-city — usually defined as a city with a population of 10 million or more — isn’t a new phenomenon, or one that China invented. Yet urbanists are looking to China (where Shanghai and Beijing are already mega-cities, and at least a dozen others are huge, if not “mega”) to find the capital of the 21st century, rather like Paris was the capital of the 19th, and New York the capital of the 20th.”

“Politicians often talk about the importance of arts and culture. But this summer, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick took an important step in creating a special position in the state’s Office of Business Development to focus on cultural issues.”

“There’s a credit crisis right now, but that hasn’t stopped Oregonians from giving to the Oregon Cultural Trust, which, in turn, is dispersing its funds in record amounts… The trust announced $1.65 million in grants for 2009, an increase of about 21 percent.”

“When inner-city business owners decided to unite against the scourge of graffiti, they thought they had nothing to lose but its stain. But a summer painting project went awry when a figure in a mural depicting Eastern European immigrants in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike took on a startling resemblance to” Karl Marx. The artist has been told in no uncertain terms to scrap the Marxist imagery.

The Ludacris song that endorses Barack Obama while taking offensive shots at his opponents is emblematic of a larger issue for the candidate. “Some of the Democrat’s most vocal (literally) supporters are sticking him with a hip-hop dilemma: how to respond to an art form that has a long history as a cultural wedge issue but whose fans and wildly unpredictable practitioners are a part of his base?”

“At least one lawmaker is already crying foul over Friday’s expected Federal Communications Commission’s censure of Comcast for faking internet traffic to limit its customers’ peer-to-peer file sharing. Republican minority leader Rep. John Boehner said the FCC would be ‘essentially regulating the internet.'”

“Artists and performers chasing success in Sydney should pack their bags and leave. Head to Melbourne, Perth or Brisbane. Anywhere really, as long as it is outside [the state of New South Wales.] That is the advice from some of Sydney’s most experienced independent artists, fed up with delays from the state’s leading arts funding body.”