Sydney festival has suspended all funding agreements with foreign governments and their cultural agencies, after a mass boycott by artists and audiences earlier this year. - The Guardian
This shrinking of American “funny pages” comes more than a century after the rise of the print comics section. “Comic strips were created — by editors and publishers —for a very good business reason: to attract and hold readership in order to beat out the competition.” - Washington Post
Australia's state capitals had some strict lockdowns, with Melbourne the world's most severe. Performing arts groups are still reporting attendance remaining stubbornly below 2019 levels. (Except in Western Australia, which locked out the rest of the country instead of locking down. Tickets in Perth are selling like gangbusters.) - The Guardian
“The Indian contemporary art scene has been rocketing since Covid. People have been spending a lot of time in their homes and want something good on their walls. They’re not looking as much overseas anymore.” - The New York Times
A white woman making a film about four men who were in Saudi Arabia, undergoing deradicalization? Sundance has dumped it, but one Muslim American film critic says, "It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see." - The New York Times
How? Big data. "Headset devices are able to record things like a person’s movements, facial attributes, blinking, surroundings, and their activities when they’re in the metaverse." - Fast Company
The unnamed producer controlled what she wore and how she handled business matters. "One evening, she writes, after she and the man attended a sporting event, he placed his hand on her thigh, his hand ultimately grazing her crotch." - The New York Times
The Keller Auditorium's "setting and its bones mean that there is great potential here, at a time when downtown needs its cultural landmarks more than ever. Yet to close Keller for repairs would be to turn off the revenue stream that makes such investments possible." - Oregon ArtsWatch
‘Art is about allowing people not to have limits on their imaginations. So if audiences are starting to look for something political in the work that may or may not be there, and then they are interpreting it in those narrow terms, that’s a dangerous direction for art to be heading. It’s reducing art to propaganda.’ - ArtsHub
On the waste-of-money side are several MPs, including one who's asked the National Audit Office to investigate the festival. Unboxed's chief creative officer insists that the project is "absolutely value for money" and that millions have people have engaged with hundreds of events, many on local, under-the-radar levels. - BBC
One out of every 10 full-time workers was homeless at some point in the previous two years, and two-thirds didn’t have enough money to pay for food. At the same time, in 2018, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger collected $65 million—or 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. - Daily Beast
London's Pleasure Gardens transformed the concept of leisure. Offering an environment in which societal norms could be cast aside, if only for a few hours, they captivated the public with their heady mix of culture, fashion and vice. - BBC
"We have a real emphasis on cultural-competency training and cultural-empathy training with our staff," says the director, Dr. Tonya Matthews. "But ... there is actually a lot of joy in our site, and that has to do with how we put the story of slavery in full context." - The New York Times
