Category: issues

A new report says that in a few decades whites will be a minority in Britain. “Colonial pomposity and imperial cruelty have been severely undermined to the point of oblivion. There is no economic basis for this phenomenon. National capital has been dissolved into global capital, drawing into its wake an international population now at ease in England.” – The Observer (UK) 09/10/00

“Faced, then, with a public that craves variety while it is governed by the familiar, the choice of what cultural products and symbols to produce and reproduce – and what cultural meanings to represent – becomes increasingly a marketing decision of how many ticket sales, book sales, symphony subscriptions, etc., will be generated. In this corporatized, profit-motivated environment, all culture is mass culture, since mass consumption of the highest levels possible is the ultimate goal. Judgments of quality and taste are replaced by a marketing distinction between mainstream and nonmainstream, based primarily on sales figures, what’s hot and what’s not, and who’s ‘into’ it.”  – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 09/10/00

“It’s amazing to see – after more than a decade of decimation – one arts leader after another fail to grasp the fact that it’s hardball, not the soft sell, that succeeds in Washington.” – Hartford Courant 09/10/00

“According to the literary critic Northrop Frye, each of the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere has given rise to a correlative genre: satire belongs to winter, comedy to spring, romance to summer and tragedy to fall. Our present civilization has little appetite for tragedy, but a wispy shadow of Frye’s theory persists, as the coming of autumn sends children back to school and putatively serious movies back into the multiplexes.” – New York Times 09/10/00 

The US Senate is holding hearings next week on violence in the entertainment industry. The buzz is about what Hollywood film executives might be hauled in to testify. – Inside.com 09/07/00

In the so-you-can-rest-easier department, isn’t it nice to know that NATO is protecting our interests in culture as well as in the skies? “The aim of NATOarts is to advance the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s goals in the cultural realm. There was also a feeling that an organization such as NATO should take a more proactive role in the formation of international culture.” – New York Press 09/06/00

The entertainment industry is pumping big money into politics. “The Democrats have collected $5.8 million from the television, movie, and music industries, ranking it fourth on the campaign donation list. That figure outpaces the Republicans by $2.1 million, which ranks the entertainment industry eleventh.” The money figures to influence policies on recording, intellectual property and content regulation. – Wired 09/06/00

Australia’s major performing arts companies are lobbying the government to refund the GST paid on all their tickets since the new tax went into effect earlier this year, on the grounds that they should all be granted exempt status as “charitable institutions.” – The Age (Melbourne) 09/06/00

English is becoming the common language of education worldwide. “The development is unprecedented. Not even Latin, the European scholarly language for almost two millennia, or Greek in the ancient world before it, had the same reach. For the first time, one language, English – a bastard mixture of old French dialects and the tongues of several Germanic tribes living in what is now England – is becoming the lingua franca of business, popular culture, and higher education across the globe.” – Chronicle of Higher Education 09/05/00

The Ars Electronica Festival in Austria likes to be controversial. Organizers “spent the weekend trying to dampen the outcry from local right-wing politicians over a “Sperm Race” exhibit set up in the city’s main square – and also defending the festival from the charge that it was not doing enough to confront the threat posed by Joerg Haider’s right-wing Freedom Party.” – Wired 09/04/00