“There are those who expect that whatever alternative cultures they encounter through social media must comply with their own aesthetic or moral framework. They feel entitled, not just to enter spaces and places where they do not necessarily belong, but also to demand censure and closure if they don’t like what they find there.”
Not really. “As for displacement — the most objectionable feature of gentrification — there’s actually very little evidence it happens. In fact, so-called gentrifying neighborhoods appear to experience less displacement than nongentrifying neighborhoods. It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether.”
“In some of the discussion surrounding the case, there has been an implication that Muslims (and other non-Westerners, for that matter) don’t have the rich satirical tradition found in places like France. That’s not quite true. Satirical traditions may not be the same in France as they are in Iraq or Venezuela. But the mocking of rulers, politicians and pretensions has long had a place in every culture.”
“Cartoons depicting Muhammad are unthinkable in Muslim countries. But there are plenty of homegrown satirists poking fun at reactionaries, autocrats and jihadis. Our writers in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon and Iraq explain where the line is drawn.”
“Having scored a $38 million Robert W. Woodruff Foundation grant in December, the Woodruff Arts Center announced Tuesday that it has a received a $6.6 million grant … [to fund] a new three-year program designed to better connect families and students with the arts center’s art and arts education offerings.”
“Last month, Opera Australia removed a music critic for the Sydney Morning Herald from its complimentary press ticket list after the company’s artistic director was reportedly “very offended” by a piece on the newspaper’s arts website. This was followed Jan. 2 by a similar “comp” list ban against a critic for the publication Stage Noise. And in New York, a theatrical press agent blacklisted Wall Street Journal writer Joanne Kaufman, after she admitted to “bolting” from Broadway shows during intermission.”
“According to Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times, we are witnessing a transformation: a downsizing of our cultural capital generated by ‘anti-elite rage, market populism, and corporate consolidation.’ The creative class is being exploited rather than supported — by its supposed ‘friends’ as well as its enemies.”
“The $1.1 million in state taxes that Brown wants to allocate for the arts council is one one-thousandth of a percent of the $113.3 billion in overall general fund spending he proposed last week. That continues a longstanding policy going back to the early 2000s in which California governors invariably have proposed anteing up the bare minimum from state tax coffers that’s needed to qualify for about $1 million in matching federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.”
“Music, performing and visual arts, one of nine sectors included as part of the creative industries, showed a 19% increase on 2012, which is second only to product, graphic and fashion design. The new figures also show a 46% increase in the music and performing arts sector since 2008. Meanwhile, film, TV, video, radio and photography was worth £9.3 billion in 2013, a decrease of 5.2% on 2012. The sector as a whole however has increased by 13% since 2008.”
“We need to raise our audience. As experienced audience members, we need to provide feedback regularly. Finally, it is our job as teachers in all facets to radicalize and actualize our students to understand the “why” and not just the “how” of making music for others.”
“For every dollar of increased spending on artworks, $1.98 of total economic output is created. In the case of museums, every new dollar of demand creates $1.76 of gains. On the jobs side, every new publishing job created (which includes arts management software) produces a whopping 3.5 additional jobs throughout the economy, while each additional professional artist produces an average 2.9 jobs.”
“Although there’s no admission charge, audiences are asked to consider making a donation to benefit a different nonprofit each month. The chosen nonprofit brings concessions, and the audience is invited to ‘Take what you like, give what you can.’ In this model, nonprofits are considered essential partners and not competitors. There’s no mentality of scarcity – only the refreshing belief that we secure a stronger community by working together, and everyone wins in a sharing economy.”
“In 2012, creative industries generated $698.7 billion in added value (total sales minus the cost of production), making up 3.8% of the US national GDP (more than the industries of construction, transportation, travel, tourism, or agriculture). The total US output for that year was $1.1 trillion.”
“Following a sharp decline in overall arts attendance that occurred from 2002 to 2008,” one NEA report states, “participation rates held steady from 2008 to 2012” for classical music, jazz, and dance performances. However, ticket sales for non-musical plays continued to slip further during those final four years, and attendance at stage musicals—one of the few art forms that had been holding steady earlier in the decade—declined from 2008 to 2012.
The NEA releases its latest study: “The latest SPPA compares arts participation rates based on surveys from 2002, 2008, and 2012, as well as regional, state, and metro-area statistics. Several of the findings are particularly noteworthy. Adults who attended performing arts or visited museums as children were three to four times as likely to see shows or visit museums as adults.”
“In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the big challenge—in Europe certainly, but everywhere—was to establish as a principle that historic centers have to be preserved. But in the two-thousands—probably for the next three, four, five decades—the real challenge is to transform the periphery. If we fail in doing this, it will be a real tragedy.”
“The NEA found that in 2012, nearly three-quarters of American adults – about 167 million people – used electronic media to view or listen to art. But just 33.4 percent of the more than 37,000 adults surveyed attended one of the seven categories of art events that same year, compared with 41 percent in 1992.”
Never ones for prudence, the satirical French weekly’s editors have made the Prophet – holding a Je suis Charlie” sign – the cover boy for what they’re calling the Survivors’ Issue.
“Satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo could not be printed in Australia under existing restrictions on free speech … Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson [said that] the restrictions contained in section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act would ‘ensure it would be shut down'; he was supported in this position by media law experts.”
“The great myth about the art world is that it is loaded with money. It is, of course, but only at the top end. Collectors, successful dealers and some artists are rich. Yet around this elite, and servicing it, is a constellation of magazines, books, critics and websites, curators and exhibitions that is not so profitable.”
“Anticlerical French thought traces its origins to rambunctious early Catholic practices such as Carnival, in which Christian morality was temporarily and gleefully suspended, as well as to Renaissance literary representations of priests as importunate louts.”
“Even as shows such as ‘Black-ish,’ ‘Empire’ and ‘Cristela’ broaden the diversity of characters and stories on television, the opportunities for first-time female and minority directors on TV remain limited.”
“It was tasteless, that’s what they say. And perhaps it was. I’m not going to make a career out of baiting some fucking religious fanatics, you know, by insulting their prophet. I wouldn’t do that. That seems crazy. But then, after they got killed, I just had to draw that cartoon.”
“The British thought the Germans needed to be nurtured as allies against the growing power of the Soviet Union. But were such compunctions realistic? Would showing the film to postwar Germany have been a propaganda reverse for the British, serving to alienate the Germans and tip the emerging cold war in the Soviets’ favour?”
“More than a dozen technology companies, including Twitter, have relocated alongside the impoverished neighborhood, some buoyed by city tax breaks. The prospective changes to the Tenderloin — a noirish haunt of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and arguably the central city’s last working-class neighborhood — have given rise to a new nickname: the Twitterloin.”
“We like to say – we who work with pens (or pixels) – that the pen (or pixel) is mightier than the sword. Then someone brings a sword (or Kalashnikov) to test the claim, and we’re not so sure. … The truth is – for better and for worse – that, no, most of us, even in the most free of Western societies, are not Charlie.”
Andrew O’Hehir: “Charlie Hebdo is not just some random publication that made fun of Muhammad. It’s something closer to a canary in the coal mine of democracy. It’s a dissident, thorn-in-the-side paper that was once closed down by its own government, in the putative homeland of liberty and equality. It’s a paper that has doggedly sought out the outer edge of acceptable expression, a paper devoted to offending anyone and everyone and to scourging those who hold power over others.”
“The discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness!”
Jonathan Chait: “The Muslim radical argues that the ban on blasphemy is morally right and should be followed; the Western liberal insists it is morally wrong but should be followed. Theoretical distinctions aside, both positions yield an identical outcome. The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism. One cannot defend the right without defending the practice.”
William Saletan: “The fantasy of these terrorists, like those who previously bombed Charlie Hebdo and attacked a Danish cartoonist, is that they’re honoring Islam. But they aren’t. They’re disgracing it. When you murder people in the name of Allah, you fulfill the most pernicious of all Muslim stereotypes. You do so not in ink, but in blood. Your crime sows fear of all Muslims. You don’t avenge the caricature. You are the caricature.”