[contextly_auto_sidebar id="yr02ykA7Q0RDGNfP4OZ9UZcMkpPsr0Ye"] THIS may seen far afield from a site devoted the arts, but anyone who's read CultureCrash the blog, or the book that inspired it, knows that economics and our values are central to my concerns. They also exert a major force on how culture does and doesn't work. Our economic assumptions give us a sense of what is -- and isn't -- … [Read more...]
What I Have in Common With Andrew Sullivan
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="nKnrC7PUeqDJC4RDR5siDCwLQPIJamEg"] OVER the last few years, as the traditional print media has fallen into a tailspin, a number of observers -- including very smart, canny ones -- have predicted that blogs would replace print as well as the more established websites. Andrew Sullivan, whose site The Dish was updated often and drew an enormous readership, was often … [Read more...]
Music For the Rich — Only
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="cELFSD2urf59ms0bpah0vxzoSfd8JREJ"] THE Brits have been more comfortable discussion notions of social/ economic class than we are here in this classless paradise. (Was it Rick Santorum who called "middle class" a Marxist term?) In any case, a new report from the British press asks, "is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?" The article, in I-D, is … [Read more...]
The War on Drugs and Mexico’s 43 Students
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Pln6fxEk2TX0tQNMAlUpd0JSCmyG43Dh"] WHEN I was in Puebla, Mexico, a few weeks back, the story of the 43 missing students -- thought to have been murdered by a collusion between a drug gang and government officials in Guerrero -- was heating up and protests were beginning. To some, they are the latest victims of the War on Drugs launched, and largely maintained, by the … [Read more...]
Artists and the Cost of Living
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="32NG0O50Xp95O5D44s23SJZqusoP0VKy"] WE see it again and again: A marginal -- rough, industrial or just boring -- neighborhood attracts artists and musicians and generates an "edgy" reputation. For a few years, good things happen. But after a while -- and, often, a benign explosion of coffee shops and bike paths and cheese stores -- the artists and musicians and fellow … [Read more...]
Don’t Forget Indies First and Small Business Saturday
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="7mL6F2lbAkJJdYtci9RNPwVHLSs7mqPA"] TODAY, of course, is the start of holiday-shopping season -- which sounds like a euphemism for something -- so I want to remind me readers how important it is to frequent independent, brick-and-mortar shops when you go looking for books and music especially. This year sees both the Indies First campaign -- which urges support of … [Read more...]
Is European Arts Funding Doomed?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="KkC7I9hLXMdSqZ9yVeCleKO4zeItPdkO"] ONE subject that comes up a lot on this site, especially in reader comments, is the public funding of art by European nations. That funding makes a lot of things possible -- including access -- that the market would not support. A new dispatch from Paris -- where a private museum designed by Frank Gehry has recently opened -- … [Read more...]
How Artists Do (and Don’t) Make a Living
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1O7lUANtRWwF1iIA86MpOYppo1xNtR5Y"] A NEW study is starting to draw attention, and it confirms some of what we've suspected: That despite the rise of university programs to educate artists, the employment market for the fine arts continues to tighten. So we're left with more and more people stranded, often with significant amounts of student-loan debt. And the number … [Read more...]
Waging War on Middlebrow
A PROFOUND story appeared in the New York Times a few days ago and seems to have gotten far less discussion that it deserved. I mean film critic A.O. Scott's "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow." This is one of the best pieces I've seen connecting income inequality and the whole 1 percent business to culture and the middle class's role in it. Scott begins by speaking about Thomas Piketty's Capital … [Read more...]
Art for the Uber-rich
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="9cukHwn37jIza9qSYJkcWoPfxa124uvq"] DESPITE the struggles of many visual artists, not to mention the stagnant middle class in the Anglo-American world, art's auction market continues to boom. The latest story from the New York Times, on the London auction season, has some interesting details. “The sleepy days of collecting are over,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the … [Read more...]