Berlin’s Independent Artists Want The City’s Cultural Funding To Be Less Institutional

Ninety-five percent of the cultural budget goes towards funding big institutions—operas, theatres, and art collections—whereas the independent scene receives the remaining 5 percent for individual projects and grants. The forty to fifty thousand independent cultural workers in the city have recently demanded for this imbalance to be changed. Artists’ political engagement is often the catalyst for a strong and diverse urban democracy, and it is therefore important to understand why and how they get engaged in politics.

So How Do You Measure The Impact Of Your Work As An Artist?

“Unlike arts organizations that might have resources for evaluating the impact of their programs, individual artists often lack the capacity to measure how their projects drive social change. They are active. They are doing the work. Providing independent artists with clear content for their own advocacy, and boosting their own research capacities, is vitally important to driving evidence-based practice in the field. I know this because I am one of them.”

A Trans Gender Literary Canon?

“I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.”

Annapurna Devi, The Greatest Sitar Player That Almost No One Heard, Dead At 91

She was the daughter of Allaudin Khan, the greatest Indian classical musician of his age; her brother was Ali Akbar Khan and her first husband was Ravi Shankar. Her specialty was the surbahar (bass sitar), and when she and her husband performed together, audiences were even more impressed by her than by him. About a decade into that (very stormy) marriage, she stopped performing in public entirely and became (though something of a recluse) one of India’s most revered classical music teachers.

The Vatican’s New Game App Is Like Pokémon Go, But With Saints

Follow JC Go “is based on the hugely popular Pokémon-catching game. But instead of collecting as many Pokémon as possible, players must try and find saints, biblical characters, and other religious figures to add to their Evangelization Team, known as an eTeam, and complete in-game challenges. Similar to Pokémon Go, Follow JC Go uses GPS to detect a user’s location in the city.”

A Spirited Case For Translators

Literature in translation has never been a priority in the Anglo-Saxon world. While, in a country like Italy, more than half of fiction titles published will be translated, in the US the share of the market is much smaller, somewhere around three percent. Translators are poorly paid and, for the most part, unsung. How encouraging, then, to see a growing advocacy for translated literature and a spirited defense of those who practice this art.