"Adelaide Fringe festival is scrambling to determine how the sudden closure of South Australia's borders to Melbourne residents may affect dozens of its shows. The festival, the second largest open-access arts festival in the world after the Edinburgh Fringe and the largest in the southern hemisphere, is scheduled to open on 19 February and run for four weeks." Last...
Understanding postcritique begins with understanding what has been the dominant mode of interpretation in literary studies for many decades: critique. Critique involves giving an account of a text that is not the account the text would give of itself. The novel or story or poem, from this perspective, is never really about what it says it’s about. Nor is...
The money was to go toward developing a Carpathian "heritage" trail" in Poland's Podkarpackie region. After a local activist brought to funders' attention a resolution passed by the regional government "expressing opposition to the promotion and affirmation of the ideology of the so-called LGBT movements," the grant was withdrawn. - Thomson Reuters
“If we artists had a basic income, that stress and fear over basic necessities would no longer weigh over our heads and we could be much more productive. It would help grow the economy, because when people have the means to do more than just get by, they put more back into the economy.” - The Tyee
Hungary, Poland, and now Slovenia are assembling and executing a “playbook” to shift cultural institutions to the right. Often, the rhetoric around this has blended fears of anti-communism with populist, nationalist, anti-immigrant, and, in some cases, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. In the process, political memory has become a flashpoint in Europe’s so-called culture war. - Artnet
"The J. Paul Getty Trust initiated the fund, to be officially announced Tuesday, and the California Community Foundation is administering it. Struggling arts organizations with an annual operating budget of under $10 million prior to the pandemic are eligible to apply for unrestricted funds that can go toward programming or operating expenses such as rent, utilities and staff compensation...
Used to hiring artists who work as independent contractors in exchange for program or project fees, it’s been tough for these small nonprofit arts groups in particular to adapt to AB5, the labor law intended to give the state’s workers more benefits by preventing employers from misclassifying them as contractors in order to save money. - KQED
And, given the notorious personal relationship between the two men, it's no surprise that their plans are entirely separate. Governor Cuomo's scheme, called NY PopsUp, will consist of 300 free events over the next 100 days and 1,000 by Labor Day, many featuring very well-known artists, at "existing landscapes" throughout the state. Mayor de Blasio's program, called Open Culture...
"This marks the second chapter of the so-called 'Neustart Kultur' program (New Start Culture), which was first launched last July with a bailout of €1 billion dispersed across cultural sectors in the nation of 83 million. The program consists over 60 sub-programs and supports cinemas, museums, theaters, and other venues and creatives." - Artnet
"There’s this idea that because we’re removing the names we’re somehow removing the stories in what we’re learning, and that in fact is not the case. It’s really just sharing in our schools what is and isn’t uplifted. And that’s part of my work as a school-board member. That’s been my work as a teacher. What are we highlighting...
Lead singer Nadya Tolokonnikova, who has been imprisoned before for her music and activism: "Art is the most important weapon I have against a repressive regime." - BBC
This is not a democratic move: "The Muslim comic thrown in a Madhya Pradesh jail on January 1, 2021 with four others on suspicion that he might make some jokes about Hinduism." - Vice
It's not usually after a disaster: in those cases, great cities tend to rebuild and often become grander. (Think of London and Chicago after great fires, Lisbon and San Francisco after earthquakes, Berlin and Tokyo after bombing.) "Mismanagement and inertia are more formidable foes than cataclysm, though they administer less dramatic death." - Curbed
With misinformation and disinformation (here’s the difference) flourishing unchecked online, being able to discern fact from fiction is especially crucial. We witnessed the fatal violence and the humiliation on the world stage that ensues when a critical mass of our citizens can’t tell the difference between lies and truth. How can democracy, which relies on an informed citizenry, prevail...
"Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial over a book examining Poles' behaviour during the Second World War, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the future of independent Holocaust research under Poland's nationalist government. … comes in the wake of a 2018 law that makes it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of...
