Perhaps it's better to say the culture wars have been brought to the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic in the Alps, courtesy of prime minister Janez Janša, now in a third term as prime minister. (His previous term ended in a 2013 corruption scandal.) Janša has been replacing museum directors, canceling government leases and contracts with arts organizations, and pushing a...
There is ample absurdity to wring from the fine-art ecosystem, where hierarchies and quid pro quos rule. Players ruthlessly engage in an unspoken competition for limited opportunities and resources—be they grants, residencies, publications, exhibitions, panel spots, teaching gigs, public commissions, or sales. And all of the above is adjudicated by gatekeepers who, like the gods of Olympus, deal fate...
After the open letters are published, the articles are out, and the declarations are made on social media, what happens to the people behind them? Artnet News spoke with a number of whistleblowers to find out what followed their news-making efforts and the emotional costs of going public. - Artnet
Before the pandemic, in-person classes offered by the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company tended to be small, with only 8 to 10 students. But over the last months, the theater has dropped prices between 50% and 80% and, it wrote, watched enrollment triple. - Chicago Tribune
"A leisure class of the newly vaccinated will mean that hotels, catering services and other businesses will be scrambling to employ bartenders, servers and other staff who are also vaccinated, the better to ensure the safety of all. A vaccination will begin to represent not only safety from the virus but also, for some, a leg up in the...
“Are we giving to organizations that are actually doing the best work? Or are we giving to organizations that are giving us the best grants?” - WestWord
"Staff with the city's Cultural Arts Division unveiled an entirely new funding system in mid-December that, among other changes, lowers the funding cap for all funding programs, drops organizational support in favor of funding events, and allows for-profit businesses to apply for city arts funding. The new funding system also places top priority on 'proposals that directly enhance cultural...
"It’s worth recalling that federal support for the arts throughout modern American history has been bipartisan. The Federal Art Project (1935–43) commissioned artworks by some 10,000 artists during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, while in 1969 Richard Nixon doubled what Lyndon Johnson had previously provided for the newly created NEA." - Apollo
Some things have changed. But the news affiliates? Oof. The details of CBS Television Stations President Peter Dunn's racism - saying of an anchor, "He’s not doing that ‘jive talking’ anymore? Sometimes, he’s just not speaking my language," for instance - and sexism are damning. - Los Angeles Times
It's not going to be easy: "Genetic determinism is a fantasy tradition. ... As both a ruleset and a fantasy backdrop, D&D is in the business of translating these racial differences into numerical scores." - Wired
Despite the fact that the previous president was, himself, the product of show business, the arts seemed to mean nothing to him. "If artists were hostile to Trump’s policies, Trump’s White House — perhaps from a self-protective attitude of 'If I can’t have it, then I never wanted it' — was unusually inhospitable to or at best uninterested in...
The survey of 3,300 frequent attenders (most over 60 and almost all over 40) found that, now that COVID-19 vaccines are being given to the public, more than two-thirds expect they'll be comfortable at indoor performances by June. (The rest say not until 2022.) More than three-quarters said they'd be willing to pay more to make up for revenue...
"President Joe Biden on Wednesday issued an executive order to dissolve the 1776 Commission, a panel stood up by President Donald Trump … as an apparent counter to The New York Times' 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project aimed at teaching American students about slavery that Trump, speaking last fall, had called 'toxic propaganda.'" - CNN
The new Barbie, whose face is “sculpted to Dr Angelou’s likeness” and who is wearing a head-wrap, jewellery and floral print dress on its “curvy body”, joins Rosa Parks and Florence Nightingale in the “Inspiring Women” series of Barbie dolls. - The Guardian
This is the greatest modern artistic nation in Europe. Art history tends to get it all wrong, exaggerating the glamour of French art, just as it does with American art. And in Britain, laughably, we even try to kid ourselves that Henry Moore and John Piper are modernist greats. The reality is that nowhere else has produced as much...
