Reddit’s AskHistorians subreddit – one of the largest history forums on the internet – doesn’t bother debating Holocaust deniers. Instead, it bans them, and one moderator says Facebook should, too, because “deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal.”
Issues
Stage Workers Picket Toronto Exhibition Space After They’re Locked Out By Management
The site’s board of governors locked out the union, IATSE Local 158, and then asked the stagehands and technical workers not to picket until after the Canadian National Exhibition. The union responded, “That’s not going to happen. … We are not going to surrender our rights under the law and jeopardize the safety of Torontonians and other visitors to Exhibition Place as a favour to Tory’s friends. Nor will we put visitors at risk.”
One-Third Of UK Performing Arts Students Have Been Sexually Harassed: Survey
“The poll of 600 drama, music and dance students found that more than half (51%) had experienced inappropriate behaviour, sexual harassment or bullying. Nearly two thirds (73%) of those who experienced some sort of incident identified as female. … When asked if they had reported their concerns, 57% who had experienced inappropriate behaviour did not report it. Just 13% did.”
What’s The Problem With Americans’ Love Of Happy Endings? When It Collides With Real Life
Using as examples the recent reunion – enthusiastically captured and craftily edited by CNN – of a Salvadoran refugee woman with the six-year-old daughter ICE separated from her as well as the cute-turned-creepy-turned-cruel viral tale known as #PlaneBae, Megan Garber considers “how easily the desire for a happy ending can insinuate itself on the facts of the matter. The possibility at play … is that the full story, and its attendant horrors, will get washed away in the easy rituals of false closure. It is that people will forget, because the logic of the happy ending has given them permission to be preoccupied.”
US House Rejects Cutting NEA Budget After Last-Minute Attempt To Do So
The vote on Wednesday was 297-114. It was a boost to arts advocates, who argued that such funding was just a tiny fraction of the federal budget yet offered any array of benefits to local communities. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) proposed the funding cut via an amendment to a larger government funding bill, arguing that the purpose was to make a “small dent” in federal spending
#MeToo Charges Are Roiling Baltimore’s Performing Arts
“Organizations of all sizes have been caught off guard by the #MeToo movement. But small organizations can be at an extra disadvantage because they often lack the resources of larger groups. When a sexual harassment accusation gets made at a smaller company, it can become a community-wide problem. When something happens in your neighborhood, it feels different than it does when it happens in New York City.”
After All The Digital Theory, A Return To Making Real, Physical Art
Many of them, after having been exposed to the high-tech side of what a well-equipped institution has to offer, change direction to embrace a more hands-on, traditional way of making and ultimately learning. These students, after graduating, end up being builders of things — and not very interested in creating objects without having some physical input into its creation. After all the design philosophy and all the classes that teach design theories, this group ends up doing what attracted them in the first place to an art and design university — the making of things.
Is UNESCO World Heritage Status A Kiss Of Death For Sites In Developing Countries?
Looking at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Luang Prabang in Laos, and the Vietnamese town of Hoi An (whose historic buildings and streetscape miraculously survived the 20th-century wars), art and cultural management professor Jo Caust argues that the mass tourism that comes with the coveted World Heritage designation can turn such places into theme parks and suggests some steps that should be taken to mitigate that danger.
Chief Of Scotland’s Arts Funder Is Out After No-Good-Very-Bad-Year
Arts Festival Initiatives In America’s Heartland
Kansas City’s biennial is not the only major initiative to debut this summer in the American Midwest. Front International, a triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, also aims to draw attention to the under-represented art scene in the US’s Heartland. The region is a vague geography defined more by a state of mind: proudly homegrown but overshadowed by the rich coastal cities.
As Arts Philanthropy Pivots To Addressing Social Issues, How Do Big, Lumbering Legacy Organizations Keep Up?
Mike Scutari considers the issues involved in general and looks at how one particular old behemoth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is working with a charitable trust on a residency program for artists in such underserved New York communities as East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Survey Suggests Pro-Brexit Voters Do Not Engage With Arts
How Is It We Acquire A Taste For Something?
Whatever the answer to this question, the phenomenon is rife. Children are unlikely to appreciate a sip of beer. Yet a decade later they may relish the evening’s first pint. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, they have acquired the beer-taste. Taste acquisition does not stop at beer and blizzards: consider coffee and classical music, olives and oysters.
Sports And Pop Music Make Fortunes From Merchandise Sales. Why Not The Arts?
Merchandising? Virtually non existent but for a few big museum gift shops that contribute something to the bottom line. Many organizations make a half hearted attempt to sell shirts or calendars with the organization or artist logo at live performances, but it is an anemic exercise at best.
How The UK Government Proposes To Treat Culture Post-Brexit
The UK, it states, will always be a country that “advocates cultural diversity as part of its global identity and is committed to ensuring its support of European culture”. It proposes a “culture and education accord” that provides for UK participation in EU programmes and “allows UK institutions to be partners, associates or advisers” to EU projects and vice versa.
A Screed Against Diversity Efforts In The Sciences (Because You Should Know…)
“The science diversity charade wastes extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research and its real-world application. If that were its only consequence, the cost would be high enough. But identity politics is now altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained.”
Amid Serious Budget Woes, Toronto’s Luminato Festival Loses Its Artistic Director
Why Hasn’t Trump Awarded National Arts Medals?
Since 1985, arts figures including Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Capra and Ella Fitzgerald have received the National Medal of Arts while similar cultural achievement has been recognized by the National Humanities Medal, which presidents have awarded to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Anna Deavere Smith and Louise Glück. But neither of those medals has been awarded since President Trump took office, the longest gap ever and one that again draws attention to the president’s often awkward relationship with the arts.
By The Numbers: What Edinburgh’s Festivals Do For The City
Edinburgh’s flagship festivals contributed £14.4m to the Scottish culture sector in 2016/17, according to new research that examines the events’ local impact for the first time. The festivals, which celebrated their 70th anniversary last year, were also credited with creating a “halo effect” that enhances the reputation of Scotland’s cultural activity, and generating international opportunities for its creatives.
Could This Be How To Organize A Museum For The 21st-Century Age Of Migration?
A new exhibition in Hamburg by curator Roger M. Buergel (still known for his provocative Documenta 12 in 2007) “delivers on its contention that European museums need to do much more than just restitute plundered objects in their collections, important as that is. A 21st-century universal museum has to unsettle the very labels that the age of imperialism bequeathed to us: nations and races, East and West, art and craft.”
Head Of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Program Talks About How The Arts Demonstrably Improve Cities
Mike Scutari interviews Kate D. Levin, who was also New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner for the 12 years Michael Bloomberg was mayor, about the “virtuous cycle that public art tends to trigger” and how government and non-governmental leaders in cities are coming to understand “the creative sector’s ability to address pressing civic issues.”
Relocating This Science Museum Could Be The Most Expensive Museum Move In History
“The New South Wales state government is pushing ahead with a controversial plan to relocate the Powerhouse Museum — part of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences — from central Sydney to a western suburb, despite widespread criticism and an ongoing parliamentary inquiry. At a cost of A$1.2bn ($890m), … [the project] means demolishing the museum, which opened in 1988 in Ultimo, central Sydney, and seven historic buildings in Parramatta, 23km to the west, to make way for a new museum due to open in 2023.”
Saudi Arabia Opens Its First Performing Arts Center
The 900-seat theatre/concert hall at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (referred to with the Arabic name Ithraa) in Dhahran opened in June with two concerts by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra to celebrate the holiday Eid al-Fitr. Ithraa, designed by the architecture firm Snøhetta and funded by the oil company Saudi Aramco, says it will present a year-round program of performances from around the world as well as music and drama by Saudi and other Arab artists.
Taking Art Out Of The Studios And Into The Streets And Communities Of Ghana
In an Accra neighborhood, a monthly parade of men in drag carrying big yellow plastic jugs, which the organizer uses to make public art in a style he calls “Afrogallonism.” An artist covering himself in blue or gold paint and slow-walking through the streets of Jamestown. Immersive installations in an old train shed and car showroom in Kumasi. Covering Accra billboards in secondhand clothing and the National Theatre in jute sacks. Billie A. McTernan writes about these and other projects to bring the arts directly to regular people in the West African country.
Habsburg Culture Is Becoming Cool Again
“‘Every few weeks I do a search on Twitter and there is an incredible benevolence about the Habsburgs,’ says Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican and the former ruling family’s unofficial social-media maven. ‘There is definitely renewed interest.’ The reasons for this burst of enthusiasm are nuanced, even contradictory. This year’s centennial of the end of the first world war, and of the empire’s collapse, is part of the explanation. So is a sense that the anxieties of the late imperial period, years of disorienting change in politics and society, overlap with today’s.”
D.C. City Council Passes New Sales Tax To Fund The Arts
Revolving Door: UK Gets Its Sixth Culture Secretary In Six Years
Jeremy Wright takes up the position of culture secretary following four years as attorney general, legal adviser to the government. He replaces Hancock, who had been in the position since January this year, and becomes the sixth person to hold the post since 2012, following on from other MPs including Maria Miller and Sajid Javid.
Defendants In Oakland Ghost Ship Fire Case Plead No Contest To Manslaughter
Three dozen people were killed in a December 2016 fire at the warehouse known as the Ghost Ship, which had been illegally occupied as an artists’ colony. Derek Almena, who held the lease to the building, and Max Harris, who assisted Almena as a sort of super, initially pled not guilty but have now pleaded no contest to 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter and are expected to serve several years in prison.
The Global Rot That’s Killing Vancouver
Metro Vancouver, in its way, with its Ferraris and Lamborghinis and its glorious backdrop of the mountains and the sea, is just as much a case study in the dark, broken and ugly side of globalization. At least 20,000 Vancouver homes are empty, and nobody’s really sure who owns them. The rental vacancy rate is less than one per cent. Another 25,000 residences are occupied by homeowners whose declared taxable household incomes are mysteriously lower than the amount they’re shelling out in property taxes, utilities and mortgage payments.
How Bottom-Up Programming Is Changing A Dutch Capital Of Culture
The bottom-up programming means that events are spread across non-traditional sites throughout Friesland – which lacks an extensive network of conventional venues – using a model that seeks out and seeds local producers and companies who then source alternative ways of funding. Of course it wouldn’t be an ECoC without the punctuation of the big international shows, but even these are carefully geared to the local spirit of ‘iepen mienskip’ or open community.