Issues

The Russian feminist punk band members had been protesting another artist’s prison sentence in Siberia when they were detained by police. One of those detained, Maria Alyokhina, was convicted of “religious hooliganism” and sentenced to two years in prison for performing a “punk prayer” in Moscow in 2012.

Using artificial intelligence, researchers at USC analyzed about 1,000 popular film scripts. Aside from the fact that men talk a lot, they found “that the language used by female characters tended to be more positive, emotional and related to family values, while the language used by male characters was more closely linked to achievement. African-American characters were more likely to use swear words, and Latino characters were more apt to use words related to sexuality. Older characters, meanwhile, were more likely to discuss religion.”

“That’s where Artist Campaign School comes in: we’ll train you in everything you need to know to get your political campaign up and running. From fundraising to putting together policy statements, we are bringing together top-tier campaign veterans who will provide you with practical knowledge and set you up for a successful bid.”

Terry McDonell looks at what Thompson did to with Richard Nixon – and figures that HST would have completely understood Trump (not that he’d have liked him) and would have had a total blast writing about the Mooch.

“If you arrive on a big ship, get off, you have two or three hours, follow someone holding a flag to Piazzale Roma, Ponte di Rialto and San Marco and turn around,” said Dario Franceschini, Italy’s culture minister, who lamented what he called an “Eat and Flee” brand of tourism that had brought the sinking city so low.

The 2017 roster of honorees continues to favor popular culture at the expense of theater and classic music. This year’s celebration will spotlight three pop musicians who have collectively sold hundreds of millions of recordings. Absent are big-name Hollywood actors and Broadway stars.

“Representatives of the wide range of traditional arts, including classical music, opera and ballet, have been slowly edged out until, it seemed, they were lucky to be represented with a single award among the five given out each year. This year even that toehold looks precarious. Of the five artists to receive the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, only dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade falls into the tradition of the arts on which the Kennedy Center was founded and built its reputation.”

“Performing and visual arts high schools like New World inspire a fierce devotion among students and graduates. It is no wonder. Many serve as springboards to the professional world. Just as important, graduation and college attendance rates are typically high (100 and 96 percent for New World), particularly impressive considering the schools’ urban setting. The best of these schools offer a conservatory-style training ground that helps budding artists win admission to an undergraduate arts program — training that is expensive, requiring a cadre of specialized teachers and money for student performances.”

“This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase ‘the 22nd century.'”

“There is a fine line in promoting artists’ work appropriately. All too often  artists with disabilities are given empathetic reviews replete with that “inspiration porn” trope of heroism overcoming tribulations, but ultimately they are not taken seriously as artists. Aesthetic validation is far more important than sympathy.”

“The idea: Provide students with real-world professional experience at cultural nonprofits small and large, be it the Center for the Study of Political Graphics or the Museum of Contemporary Art. The first crop of 89 interns completed sessions at 80 arts organizations around Los Angeles in summer 1993. Twenty-five years later, the Multicultural Internship Program is still going strong. Over that period, the Getty Foundation has funded more than 3,200 internships at an estimated 160 Los Angeles arts organizations — including 120 internships this summer. That amounts to an investment of more than $12 million over a quarter century.”

“The £110m Factory arts centre is set to be built on the site of the old Granada Studios in Manchester city centre … But now it needs approval for a second time after designers realised the glazed exterior would play havoc with the centre’s acoustics. They have also discovered that the theatre design was too complex and the orchestra pit too small.” The architects are OMA, Rem Koolhaas’s firm.

The wife-carrying race is only the beginning: there’s swamp soccer, competitive hobby horse, cell-phone tossing, and the Mosquito Killing World Championship. Among others. Why? “Finns offer various deep-seated factors, including an enthusiastically outdoorsy populace (that goes slightly stir-crazy during the region’s oppressively dark winter months), widespread public access to recreational spaces, and a continuing relaxation of the traditionally reserved national character. (Also, alcohol.)”

“A study from 2016 assesses the odds of artistic longevity through the prism of academia: does a formal education enhance one’s chances of making it (and staying) in the arts? Using data gathered by Statistics Denmark, “Artistic education matters: survival in the arts occupations” analyzes more than 27,000 employment records between 1996 and 2012 across five categories of Danish artists: visual artists, choreographers and dancers, composers and musicians, film/stage actors and directors, and writers (including journalists).”

“Three graduates of New World School of the Arts in Miami” – composer and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire (Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen), actor Cote de Pablo (NCIS), and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney (The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy and the screenplay for Moonlight) – share advice for students interested in pursuing a dream.”

Milan has just banned bottles, cans, food trucks, and selfie sticks in one of its most popular neighborhoods; Florence now forbids sandwiches or picnicking in its cathedral square; Rome will tolerate no toe-dipping in or eating near its historic fountains or drinking outdoors after dark; several cities are trying to chase kebab vendors out. Why? As Feargus O’Sullivan reports, the laws are “part of a larger nationwide struggle over the future of Italy’s urban centers – not just clamping down on trash and petty crime but also attempting to control who does and doesn’t have rights of access to key parts of the city.”

“Arts organizations and journalists need each other. Yet, to work together effectively, we need to change the mantra from ‘butts in seats’ to ‘civic discourse’ and work with media and the community in a mutually beneficial way. We can be conduits and facilitators, a constant resource to journalists, giving them the ability to experiment. We need to ensure our organizations are building relationships with journalists, editors, bloggers, and influencers, and researching media outlets before pitching.”

According to PBS chief Paula Kerger, ““PBS itself will not go away, but a number of our stations will. … There isn’t a plan B for that.”

“‘We are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts,’ ExpressVPN said in a statement.”

It reports that, while moderate inebriation doesn’t boost your ability to generate innovative ideas, it can help you avoid one major barrier to creative breakthroughs: getting stuck in a mental rut.

It is this notion of competition that has preoccupied the case for the arts for much of the past ten years, leading to a greater focus on impact and evidence of outcomes than ever before. And while the resulting improvements in measurement and evaluation are in many regards enhancing the offer the sector makes, it is an argument we can never win and which in fact misses the point.

The six, including former President Park Geun-hye’s chief of staff and culture minister, were convicted of perjury, abuse of power, and related charges for having drawn up a list of cultural figures and denied them state funding and access to programs because they were seen as political opponents of Park.

“After Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and London’s Tate Modern, the trend for converting industrial buildings into contemporary art spaces looks set to continue in the northern Italian city of Turin. The Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), an H-shaped complex of 19th-century railway repair workshops covering an area of 35,000 sq. m, is due to reopen as a privately funded ‘arts and innovation centre’ on 30 September with a trio of site-specific artists’ commissions and two weeks of free concerts.”

“The latest employment statistics from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport found that almost two million people worked in the creative industries in 2016, a 5% increase on the previous year. Across the UK, employment grew by 1.2% year on year. The overall number of creative industries employees has grown from 1.5 million in 2011 to 1.9 million in 2016, now making up 6% of all UK jobs.”