The skinny budget also eliminates funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, AmeriCorps, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Trump has already made deep cuts at those agencies and put most—if not all—of their employees on leave. - InsideHigherEd
The general admission tickets for the world-famous event in Somerset were released at 09:00 BST on Sunday, and the festival announced on X they were gone by 9:20 BST. - BBC
“Joe Chialo, from the conservative CDU party, had initially sought to defend the cost-saving measures but became a lightning rod for anger over the cuts. However, he said Friday that extra measures now being planned went too far and could ‘lead to the imminent closure of nationally known cultural institutions’.” - AFP (Yahoo!)
Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right. - Dissent
We wanted to make clear that in many respects, trans and queer have always been with us. You can’t talk about same-sex desire without interrogating what sex you are talking about. - The Gay & Lesbian Review
“As of Feb. 14, the city has a real, big city-style department, the Office of Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment. After years of performers, administrators, boards, and venues having to bounce between offices for everything from grants to permits, there’s finally a one-stop shop whose sole concern is the arts.” - The Austin Chronicle
The roots of May Day, or International Workers Day, stretch back over a century to a turbulent and pivotal time in U.S. labor history — labor unions’ struggle for an eight-hour workday during the 1880s. Unions later recommended that workers be honored every May 1. - AP
The new funding, which will support humanities councils in all 50 states and six jurisdictions, comes a month after the National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly cut off federal funding for the councils, as well as most of its existing grants. - The New York Times
“The Mellon Foundation has announced $15 million in ‘emergency funding’ for state humanities councils across the country. The support comes after the Department of Government Efficiency abruptly cancelled some $65 million in (National Endowment for the Humanities) grants earlier this month.” - NPR
“The Trump administration has terminated members of the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum appointed by President Joe Biden — including Doug Emhoff, the husband of former vice president Kamala Harris.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
Because of the speed of the administration’s actions, arts and culture groups are scrambling to reassess the scope of their projects and find alternative streams of funding. - The Art Newspaper
“A coalition ... kicked off a weeklong campaign to rally around the national African American museum and push back against what it calls efforts by the Trump administration to erase Black history. ... The museum, which opened in 2016 on the National Mall, has had millions of visitors over the years.” - USA Today
The Kennedy Center is more than a venue, it’s a “living monument” — a place where the story of American culture plays out onstage. Whatever happens at the Kennedy Center becomes part of the history it exists to preserve. That’s the part that worries me. - Washington Post
Unless you’re a studio, this discussion is useless, and can have even worse effects: “The defeatist coverage threatens to warp moviegoers’ understanding of box-office success—and whether achieving it is actually possible.” - The Atlantic
