Incoming culture secretary George Brandis “is not about to throw the Australia Council restructure into reverse, despite his misgivings about it … Brandis says his differences with Labor are philosophical: arts policy should recognise and promote intrinsic values – art for art’s sake – and not treat culture as a tool for other policy goals.”
Tag: 08.20.13
Funding Estonian Culture By Taxing Finns’ Vices
Estonia is a major destination for Finns looking to gamble or hunting for bargains on booze and tobacco. Taxes on those activities provide the revenue for the Estonian Cultural Capital Fund. “Some 29 percent of the fund’s grant money was allocated to sports last year, with composers taking the biggest cultural funding and literature around 6 percent.”
Can Architecture Help Solve The Israeli-Palestinian Dispute?
A pair of Israeli architects, using the principles of their profession and of urban planning, “have spent years working on highly specific ideas for how policymakers could divide Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine without doing permanent damage to the delicate urban fabric of the city.”
Ballet Designer Sues Mariinsky Theater Over Unpaid Fees
“Prominent Russian artist Mikhail Shemyakin said in an interview published Tuesday that he intended to sue St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater because of unpaid fees for his work as chief designer on a series of ballet productions staged eight years ago.” Shemyakin says he was told that Mariinsky director Valery Gergiev personally forbid payment to be made.
Why Elmore Leonard Was Important Far Beyond The World Of Genre Fiction
“Even people who don’t read crime fiction have felt Leonard’s legacy, which can be detected in everything from the films of Quentin Tarantino to the novels of David Foster Wallace. He wrote bestsellers and got called a ‘literary genius’ by that notoriously tough critic, Martin Amis.” And then there are those invaluable ten rules for writers.
Here’s One Small Magazine Supporting Itself Entirely Through (Cheap!) Subscriptions
Rachel Rosenfelt, editor of The New Inquiry: “We have no paywall, no advertisers, no benefactors, and we’re creative commons. Two dollars a month is $24 a year, and that’s actually pretty standard for a magazine subscription. But because we make it so low a barrier to support us, we’ve been doing very well with that.”
Ten Things We Learned About Learning This Summer
For instance: laptops in the classroom do more harm than good, you can learn a foreign language better when you sing your vocabulary, it’s good for small kids to talk with their hands, and middle-schoolers (despite what they tell you) are not really good at multitasking.
A Golden Age Of TV Critics?
“I’ve been a film critic for over twenty years, and a film and TV critic simultaneously for fifteen. I have never seen anything as innovative and thrilling as what a lot of my TV critic colleagues have been doing since the mid-aughts.”
Overshare – Is It Something About The Internet?
“What compels us to tell the world with our fingers what we’d hesitate to utter in a room full of loved ones?”
The Economics Of Music Streaming – Who Should Be Worried
“It’s songwriters–whether or not they’re performers too–who need to be wary about what’s going to happen as radio and recording sales gradually give way to streaming.”