Nan van Houte: “This is not an attempt to discredit cultural democracy; I am convinced that access to the arts and the stimulus towards personal creativity are basic human rights and needs. This is, instead, an attempt to analyze my growing uneasiness when I read yet another arts fund, council, or ministry in Western Europe is opening a strand for ‘everyday creativity.’ … Why? I am afraid that soon we will no longer have to fear for the instrumentalization of the arts, because the artists themselves will be instrumentalized.” – HowlRound
Tag: sj
Harnessing The Arts To Power The Ongoing Recovery In Puerto Rico (And ‘Hamilton’ Helps)
“While the government’s priorities shifted a bit in the immediate aftermath of [Hurricane Maria], as the island works to rebuild, tourism, particularly arts-fueled tourism, is playing a significant role.” The biggest example so far was the tour of Hamilton that Lin-Manuel Miranda brought to the island (and which attracted a lot of visitors) — and Miranda established a fund that funnels profits from that tour to local arts organizations. – Fast Company
Leadership At Top US Nonprofit Theatres Is Finally Becoming More Diverse
“Across the country, scores of artistic directors, most of them white men who have served as community tastemakers for years, are leaving their jobs via retirements, ousters, and an industrywide round of musical chairs. As their successors are appointed, a shift is underway: according to a national survey conducted by two Bay Area directors, women have been named to 41 percent of the 85 jobs filled since 2015, and people of color have been named to 26 percent.” – The New York Times
Indigenous Australian Artists: It’s Time We Stop Being Reviewed By White Culture
“It feels like a moment where we are angry and ready enough to address how white Australian review culture maligns Indigenous work by only superficially engaging with it. It feels like a moment where we are ready to sustain our own review culture. We have centuries of white engagement with Indigenous story as evidence for the need to change; we also have our own critics, who show us what’s possible when whiteness loses its frame of evaluative authority over a work.” – The Guardian
Working To Diversify The Buncha-White-Guys World Of Improv
“Improv may still skew white, but things are changing. … The following folks are currently working to alter perceptions and expectations about improv. Some are longtime warriors, others are new to the scene. But all point toward a future in which the stage presents a more diverse mix of ages, nationalities, body types, skin tones, gender identities, sexual orientations, and, yes, even political affiliations.” – American Theatre
Nonwhite And Female TV Writers Take An Awful Lot Of Crap In The Workplace: Study
“[They] faced discrimination and harassment from their fellow staff members. They remained in the same lowly jobs as their counterparts were promoted. They watched their pitches get ignored or rejected, only to see the same ideas warmly embraced when another writer pitched them. … Now a new survey, ‘Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writers Rooms,’ of nearly 300 women, people of color, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people with disabilities writing for television has captured in numbers the bias they report.” – The New York Times
The First Women-Only Club For Arts Workers Is Key For Overcoming Inequality In Industry, Says Founder
Joanna Payne, founder and director of the London club called Marguerite: “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need all-female spaces of any kind … But [for] all the time that the ‘ideal world’ is still very much just that, I think that we do.” – London Evening Standard
Sexing Up Female-Female Relationships For Biopics Isn’t Enough? Now They’re Adding Fake Lesbian Lovers To Movies About Real People
“The latest sapphic storyline to get tongues a-wagging” is Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet as paleontologist Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as her entirely fictional lover. Laments Guardian writer (and lesbian) Hannah Jane Parkinson, “It is immensely damaging that LGBTQ relationships are being fetishised for entertainment – and depressing to think that the mass audiences may not be interested in women unless they’re in bed together.” – The Guardian
What Brings Wounded Cities Back To Life? Culture, Says World Bank Report
“Investing in cultural institutions, spaces, and heritage can help build bridges between sparring communities in post-conflict urban areas and make disaster recovery quick, sustainable, and more effective. The authors argue that major cultural investments early in the reconstruction process will eventually pay off by making the city more attractive to investment and tourism, fueling economic growth.” Exhibit A: Medellín, once the most violent city in the world. – CityLab
Why The Cis Director Of The Trans-Themed Film ‘Girl’ Says He Has The Right To Tell This Story
Last year, Lukas Dhont’s debut feature won four prizes at Cannes and a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film; Netflix bought the US rights. Then came the backlash — not only were a cis director and actor appropriating the story, but the film focused too much on the character’s body — and the US release was postponed. And then the woman on whose story the film is based spoke up — for Dhont. – The Guardian