Issues

The Essex council claim they can close a third of the libraries and turn the others into volunteer-run services and still make sure their patrons have “24/7” service. Uh.

There have been many studies that take advantage of this process, and they bulk out much of the academic literature on the impact and value of the arts. The build-up to this new centre has revealed a critical mass of scholars and artists who have an appetite (and now the opportunity) to do things a bit smarter, with nuance and sensitivity to the richness of cultural experience, that doesn’t simply reduce cultural experiences to mathematical equations.

Amanda Hess: “The age of the sequel is over. Now it’s the age of the sequel to the sequel. Also the prequel, the reboot, the reunion, the revival, the remake, the spinoff and the stand-alone franchise-adjacent film. Canceled television shows are reinstated. Killed-off characters are resuscitated. Movies do not begin and end so much as they loiter onscreen. And social media is built for infinite scrolling. Nothing ends anymore, and it’s driving me insane.”

The economic-development arguments for the arts are as well-worn as they are indisputably accurate, but it is high time arts advocates in Chicago admit that they have not made an effective statewide case. It also is high time for arts advocates in Chicago to admit that so much state arts funding should not be swallowed up by relatively rich institutions in downtown Chicago. It should be for everyone.

Duty and honor? Patriotism? Rebecca Onion reminds us of the truth about “the war to end all wars”: it was bloody, cruel, and basically pointless. “How, then, to commemorate a useless war that shouldn’t have happened — a black hole in history?” Slate‘s resident history maven suggests that we have a look at some of the antiwar literature and advertising campaigns of the time.

Keep talent busy was just one of the lessons I took from Lee’s example. A second, but equally important lesson, was don’t censor talent. Lee preferred to let his talent sort out the creative details. He remembered working on a comic strip that used the word pogo stick in the punch line. The editor felt that pogo stickwouldn’t resonate with rural audiences, and he instructed Lee to change the gag so that the punch line had the word roller skates instead. It deflated the joke, but Lee changed it anyway. The strip was eventually dropped, and Lee said, “this type of censorship, to me, is almost indecent.” When you hire an artist to do a job, you let them do the job. Lee elaborated, “It seems to me that if a person is doing something creatively, and he feels that’s the way it ought to be done, you’ve gotta let him do it.”

“The budget committee of the German parliament’s lower house has approved €330m — a sum to be matched by the city of Berlin — to finance a ten-year renovation and extension of Berlin’s Natural History Museum and create an online database of its collections. … The €660m exceeds the budget for rebuilding the city’s royal palace and creating the Humboldt Forum cultural district around it.”

“A spate of books, graphic novels, documentaries and exhibitions has emerged, as artists and their audiences try to capture and understand that terrible day. … In addition to the therapeutic value they have for victims and witnesses, the artistic endeavors, many of them open to interpretation, can help others understand what they and their society are going through.”

The new student enrollment slowdown could pose economic risks. International students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $39 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 455,622 jobs during the 2017-18 school year, according to a separate report released Tuesday by NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

“Yegor Mostovshikov is under no illusions about the names he and his co-founder chose for their media company, Mamikhlapinatana, and their main online news platform, Batenka, da vy transformer. Neither make any sense to the uninitiated, whether they speak Russian or English. … [Nevertheless,] over the last year, Mamikhlapinatana‘s monthly turnover more than doubled and it has grown from a side project, which Mostovshikov and co-founder Anton Yarosh ran in their spare time, to employing over 40 permanent staff.”

Library activists started a petition to get library funding “ringfenced” or safeguarded – but the government responded that local control is everything.

Almost 90 percent of the class’s members, or 24 million workers, live in urban counties, with more than 60 percent of them in urban counties in large metropolitan areas with over 1 million people. Just a bit more than one in 10 members of the creative class live in rural communities. But these broad trends mask more nuanced patterns in the distribution of the creative class across urban and rural communities.

Regarding warning messages, researchers evaluated them to be sure they could be understood with a literacy level of 5th grade or lower. They initially hypothesized that the threat of fines alone was most likely to scare off illegal downloaders. But they were surprised to find that people are equally leery of being monitored by unknown entities — and pairing the repercussions proved most effective.

In a rare step made after millions of dollars in public funding was approved last month, the local arts commision said it would terminate any grant supporting work that the commission deemed “lewd, lascivious, vulgar, overtly political, or excessively violent, constitutes sexual harassment, or is, in any other way, illegal.” Arts leaders who were asked to sign the contract amendment expressed shock at the request, which several described as an attack on their artistic freedom.

“The 25-year-old Joan Mitchell Foundation has worked tirelessly to promote her legacy while providing critical support for working artists, particularly women and artists of color. [Mike Scutari] recently had an opportunity to connect with the foundation’s CEO, Christa Blatchford, about the foundation’s evolution, the growth of artist-endowed foundations, and some of the larger trends permeating the arts philanthropy landscape.”

It’s not just the election of Jair Bolsonaro (though that’s the tipping point); it’s the growing stridency of his conservative, and especially Evangelical, base, who (egged on by rumors and distortions on social media) have begun denouncing the work of some experimental artists and cultural figures as blasphemy or pedophilia. Some of those artists, facing death threats and not trusting the new government to protect them, are leaving the country.

The Iraqi city was the largest one that the violent extremist group conquered, and while it was liberated last year, there is still wreckage (physical and psychic) everywhere. Late last month, a group from the Iraqi National Symphony organized an orchestral concert in Mosul, and the city is hosting more cultural events as well — not least to get attention from international donors who could fund reconstruction.

Some nonprofits insist that donors expect these “premiums”; some donors insist they want as much money and staff time as possible to be spent on the nonprofit’s actual mission. Jonathan Meer, an economist who studies altruism and philanthropy, looked at existing research and did an experiment of his own to find out of giving swag to donors is worth it. The answer? Well, …