“Faced with the pending inauguration, Greg Allen said in his statement, ‘I could no longer stand by and let my most effective artistic vehicle be anything but a machine to fight Fascism.’ His new company ‘will be comprised entirely of people of color, LBTQ+, artist/activist women, and other disenfranchised voices in order to combat the tyranny of censorship and oppression.’ That explanation was received with ire and disbelief by Neo-Futurist company members, current and past, who say the troupe is now more diverse than it’s ever been, and the breakup is not political but personal—rooted in a long-suppressed history of problems between Allen and the theoretically democratic ensemble that he formed.”
Tag: 12.07.16
Claim: Musicals Are Squeezing Plays Out Of London’s West End
In an interview with The Stage, Wilson was asked if the West End needed a greater variety of theatre sizes. He responded: “Yes we do. And the reason is that the big theatres, progressively the smaller big theatres, are being used for musicals more. Gypsy going in to the Savoy, and Funny Girl… the 800 and 900-seat theatres are being used for musicals, and drama will be squeezed out.”
Did The Neanderthals Have Religion? If They Did, How Would We Know?
Well, that depends. If you consider religion strictly a matter of belief, we can’t know. But if, like anthropologist Barbara J. King, you see religion as practice, there’s evidence.
How Did You Actually Film That Embarrassing Sex Scene? 10 Directors Tell How
Kyle Buchanan talks to Leslye Headland (Sleeping With Other People), Mary Harron (American Psycho), Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), John Krokidas (Kill Your Darlings), and half a dozen others (including Paul Verhoeven of Showgirls, of course).
Corporate Arts Partnerships That Aren’t Just About Money
It’s not unusual for corporate entities to give money to arts organizations. It’s far less common for them to actually break out the hammers and nails. “We could just donate to the arts,” Joseph A. McMillan Jr., who founded DDG, said by phone. “But as a real estate company, we have opportunities and capabilities others might not possess.”
Is It Our Inconsistencies And Contradictions That Inspire Our Creativity?
“Perhaps contradictions are a necessary ingredient for triggering intellectual creativity. While most humans struggle to maintain a sense of psychological unity, contradictions produce destabilising breaches in the self. Whether conscious or unconscious, these fissures nourish creative inspiration, which can be interpreted as a way to resolve or sublimate internal oppositions. I believe this can be said of all domains of creation. Perhaps art, literature, science or philosophy wouldn’t be possible without intrapersonal contradictions and the desire to resolve them.”
Oh, *This* Will Be Juicy: Martin Amis Is Writing A Novel About Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, And Philip Larkin
“It’s hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things,” he says. “I don’t have them looking over my shoulder any more.” Because, of course, they’re all dead now.
Fort Worth Symphony Musicians Approve New Contract And Head Back To Work
“The musicians voted on Wednesday to approve a new labor agreement with orchestra management that includes a pay freeze for the first two years and modest pay raises in the last two years of the four-year contract.”
Atlanta Ballet’s New Artistic Director Turns The Company In A New Artistic Direction
Gennadi Nedvigin trained at the Bolshoi and had a 19-year dance career at San Francisco Ballet; Atlanta Ballet has lately been concentrating on contemporary works. Nedvigin will be implementing the ultra-classicist Vaganova Method, developed at and for the Mariinsky Ballet.
So What Would A Positive Federal Arts Policy Look Like In The Trump Era?
Economist Tyler Cowen has some suggestions for how he thinks national arts policy in the United States could improve under a Trump Republican Congress. A futile hope? Here were Cowen’s criteria:
First, they must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, they should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, they should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the U.S., and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes.
You’ve got to admire the effort to find the positive. Others have argued the arts could be a natural target since artists aren’t exactly in the sweet spot of Trump’s constituency. Federal arts funding has never recovered since the culture wars of the 1990s and it’s highly unlikely that the Republican Congress will increase that funding, no matter how small it is. But at a policy level, Cowen does have some interesting suggestions, basically proposing restoring restrictions put on the NEA at the time the budget was cut. He suggests restoring the NEA’s ability to fund individual artists, a punitive action meant to restrict funding controversial art. And he suggests killing the requirement that the NEA send 40 percent of its budget to state arts agencies so they can “regrant” it. This, he reasons, would give the feds more control of the money.
Restoring individual grants would be hugely popular in the arts community. But it’s difficult to tell if there would be support for removing the 40 percent state allocation. On the one hand, it would give the NEA more bang for its bucks, and the NEA is much more sophisticated in its operations than many state arts agencies. On the other hand, with so much emphasis in recent years on artists being more responsive to their communities, one could make the case that local agencies have a better sense of what their communities need.
ArtsJournal blogger Michael Rushton argues that:
“Whether you agree with his advice or not, he does raise an important issue: arts policy in the US at the federal and state level lack clear goals, and as such rigorous evaluation of the success, or failure, of their policies is near impossible. That in turn explains why the academic literature on arts policy in the US is so uncritical. What is there to criticize? What is the NEA, and in turn the state arts councils it helps to fund, trying to achieve? Without knowing that, it is not possible to evaluate whether transferring such a high percentage of federal arts funding to the states is actually a good use of funds.”
We may be at the beginning of a critical debate about what constitutes essential infrastructure in this country – what are the things that are public goods but aren’t viable as private capitalist enterprises. Trump says he’ll spend a trillion dollars on public infrastructure, but there are signs his idea is not so much to finance construction and modernization but to privatize and create tax incentives. Are the arts a public good? If even our bridges and roads are about to be privatized to pay for their rebuilding, it’s difficult to imagine the case Trump and the Republicans would make that they are.