[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME of you may know me as the author of a reasonably gloomy book on the arts, the recession, digital technology, and our fraught cultural future. When I was approached recently by the Los Angeles Times to take a look at how cultural institutions, large and small, and individual artists had experienced the 2008 crash, the belated recovery, the ensuing housing crisis, … [Read more...]
Ten Years After: Remembering The Recession
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A GREAT number of Americans have "moved on." Their lives are fine, and the Great Recession is just a bad, dimly recalled memory, like a really bad winter flu from years ago. But for a number of us, it was one of the defining events of our lives -- something whose consequences we deal with every day or every week. Over the last few days, the press has run a number of … [Read more...]
The Music of Inequality
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Remember the recession? A lot of Americans had their lives turned upside down by it. But popular music -- however you define the term -- never really engaged with the crash itself, or the widespread suffering and steep inequality that followed. In a new story for Vox, I looked at a wide range of American music released over the last decade, since the stock market crash … [Read more...]
Lauren Greenfield and “Generation Wealth”
[contextly_auto_sidebar] GENERALLY, I think the art world has missed the opportunity to address the Great Recession and the amping up of income inequality and the one percent that followed. But some visual artists have made strong and eloquent statements, and one of them is longtime Los Angeles photographer Lauren Greenfield. I caught her Generation Wealth late in its hometown run at the … [Read more...]
Arts Journalism and the Culture Crash
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME things have gotten a bit better since I published my book two years ago; some have unraveled more or less on schedule. One thing that does not seem to be improving is the state of cultural journalism: Arts critics (and reporters, like yours truly) continue to be laid off as publications scale back and decide -- just as school boards do in lean times -- that … [Read more...]