“The concept behind the Lab — a cadre of designers embedded in the mayor’s office, with the power to revive public spaces around the city and launch a broad campaign of civic engagement — was unique in North America, and almost unimaginable in conservative San Diego. It seemed to answer the long-held desire of architects, especially, for designers to play a role in the decision-making that shapes cities.”
“Following one of the most intense – and bizarre – lobbying battles in the history of modern Washington politics, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed strict new rules that give the body its greatest power over the cable industry since the Internet went mainstream.” Said the FCC chairman, “This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech.”
“There are three major principles that Internet-service providers – like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon – have to follow when sending data from their networks to your computer:”
“This school year, the fury is over the new U.S. History Advanced Placement course – in particular, whether its perspective is overly cynical about the country’s past. The controversy raises significant questions about the role of revisionism in education: How should students learn about oppression and exploitation alongside the great achievements of their country? And who decides which events become part of the national narrative as more information comes to light?”
“In a time when cultural understanding is more critical than ever before, it’s become an uphill battle for artists from Islamic countries to obtain permission to travel to the United States.”
“All organizations – not just nonprofits – are now in the business of promoting “social good” in order to gain support… If your organization imagines one of its key differentiators to be its social responsibility, well, then your thinking may be at complete odds with the way the market perceives and evaluates all organizations (i.e. nonprofits and for-profits alike).”
“Despite decades of work citing and arguing the value and benefit of the Arts as a core subject important to the education of our children, despite substantial research on that importance, despite the flourishing of hundreds, if not thousands, of exemplary programs across the country, and despite all our efforts, the public seemingly STILL thinks of the arts (at least as important in education) as a frill, a luxury.”
“In the face of such bleak statistics, it’s time for us to ask why the industries with some of the loftiest ideals and the most vocal commitments to progressivism still far so far short of reasonable expectations.”
“They figured out there was a problem when passes went on sale last week. Some 80,000 people tried to buy $390 tickets to the massive, free-for-all festival in a remote dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada in late August. But only the first 20,000 people who clicked were guaranteed a pair of tickets.”
“Cultural institutions once saw it as their priority to cultivate, preserve and display the best of the arts. Their unique contribution was to cultivate culture in the public sphere, for anyone to enjoy, by developing public understanding of the arts and sciences that have shaped the world we live in today. Through providing access to their collections and archives, they offered inspiration to, and sometimes platforms for, writers, painters, dramatists, architects, and many more.
Now they are desperate to be seen as inclusive, non-elitist public spaces.”
Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York: “The public has a real thirst to understand the world around them. But what people don’t want to do is be intimidated or made to feel like it’s too much for them to understand. We are … removing any sense that it’s too hard, remote, for experts only. It isn’t. Science really is a great detective story.”
Ed Milliband: “I come here with an offer: to put policy for arts and culture and creativity at the heart of the next Labour government’s mission. … The arts and culture define our character as a nation … [But] I can’t make promises about what funding’s going to look like in the future.”
“If I try, in the aim of cool-headed analysis, to contain that dismay, I find that my American colleagues’ quasi-rationalization of the assassination of caricaturists is rooted in a failure to distinguish between certain basic varieties of the exercise of the freedom of expression. In particular, there seems to be a broad misunderstanding of the social function, and therefore also the necessity, of satire.”
“St. Paul is as strong now as we’ve been in decades, with light rail in and a new regional ballpark coming,” said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, an early champion of the project. “But the arts and culture stuff is what continues to drive development. The Ordway, which is so beautiful on Rice Park, is key to all of that.”
“It is a given now that in order to get a foundation grant, it’s often not enough to simply apply for funding of what you do day in and day out. What do funders want? Innovation! New ways of ‘engaging’ younger audiences! High-impact special projects that others will want to emulate!”
The Academy voters “implicitly validated the project of exposing how government stores and monitors our private communications as a worthy enterprise rather than a discreditable one. In this way, civil society has just strengthened a core democratic norm.”
“Among the Republican committee’s more specific concerns were that the framework ‘includes little or no discussion of the Founding Fathers, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the religious influences on our nation’s history and many other critical topics that have always been part of the APUSH course'”
“If you’re going to risk millions of dollars, you’re going to put a man in charge of that.”
“The potential impact of 3D printers for counterfeiting just keeps on growing: A recent report by Gartner Group speculates that intellectual property loss due to 3D printer counterfeiting could total $100 billion by 2018.”
“The two frontrunners on the five-strong shortlist have spurred intense debate at home, with critics arguing that one, Polish film Ida, misrepresents the country’s past, and that another, Andrei Zvyaginstev’s Leviathan, spreads calumny on Russia’s present and its ruling regime.”
“Minorities are underrepresented compared to their numbers in the overall population by a factor of about 3-1 among lead roles in film and among film directors. That ratio is nearly 5-1 when it comes to screenwriters. On TV, minorities do best on cable, where they’re only underrepresented 2-1 among lead actors in dramas and comedies. Among show creators, the discrepancy is nearly 9-1 in broadcast, nearly 5-1 in cable. All this when ratings and box office tend to rise when casts match the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity.”
“The days when all roads led to London for young artists are over, and there appears to be an exodus of artists looking south to Bristol and Cardiff and north to Manchester, Leeds and further afield to Glasgow, places which all have a creative buzz around them. Why barely survive in London when you can live far better elsewhere, find opportunities, and put down roots?”
“With a median income that exceeds the national average, and a cultural heritage that prizes the arts, it’s little wonder that Chinese Americans would be seen as a promising source of donations. But there are challenges. Many wealthy Chinese Americans are immigrants who don’t have strong connections to L.A.’s cultural institutions. … [And] for wealthy Chinese Americans living in L.A., arts philanthropy is a relatively new concept.”
“The appeal of these environments is not so much that they help us totally escape reality. Rather, it is that they make us believe that we can recreate and change our own.’ In that way, rather than forcing a mass rejection of society, virtual worlds may open new ways of examining our own.”
“Judi Dench, David Morrissey and Julie Walters have all lamented [working-class folks’] absence. But, interestingly, they each talk about the opportunities for working-class kids that existed 20, 30, even 40 years ago, when they were establishing their careers. What has changed between then and now has nothing to do with the socially and ethically conscious people that largely make up our arts sector.”
“Brazilians celebrate the day before Lent with dancing samba in skimpy outfits. In New Orleans, revelers throw beads at Mardi Gras. In this dusty central Mexican town, they have a different kind of a blast. … Even amid the inexhaustible tally of quirky rituals that communities anywhere hold dear, the Fat Tuesday frenzy in San Juan de la Vega elicits awe.”
“It is more helpful to understand culture in terms of how it is organized, rather than simply stating what it does. The use of ecological metaphors creates a rich way of discussing culture, and different perspectives then emerge. New taxonomies, new visualisations, and fresh ways of thinking about how culture operates will help promote a rich, diverse and fruitful cultural ecology.”
“We are particularly concerned that publicly funded arts… are predominantly accessed by an unnecessarily narrow social, economic, ethnic and educated demographic that is not fully representative of the UK’s population”.
“Valentine’s Day has taken off across Asia over the past few decades, embraced by the continent’s booming youth population as well as chocolate and gift-card companies. But the holiday, a relatively recent import from the West, often clashes with conservative cultural forces and, increasingly, anti-capitalist sentiments. Below, a look at how some in India, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia are pushing back.”
In March, about a month before the big rock music shindig kicks off in the California desert, a new one-day event called the Festival of the Desert will debut in the towns around Palm Springs. Headliners include soprano Renée Fleming, ballet dancer David Hallberg, and music biz giant Quincy Jones; the artistic leader is conductor Philippe Jordan.