- The Candidates and the Arts
I was going to wait until my current essay deadline had been slapped into submission before digging into the quagmire of the upcoming Federal Election, but the fact is that I already started pulling this post together over a week ago, very shortly after the Leaders Debate aired on CBC. As Leah Sandals has rightly […]
- Friday Links: The lowest common denominator
This week’s Friday Links are coming to you a day late on Saturday, though the weekender spirit of this format remains the same. I blame the Montreal Alouettes for playing so miserably last night that I couldn’t help but stay glued to the television and watch my Ti-Cats school their first-rank asses in the fine […]
- The Bigger Picture
Last night some eighty artists, cultural organizers, politicians and buskers converged upon the newly renovated City Hall for The Bigger Picture, a forum following up on last November’s The Big Picture Revisited at the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre. Hosted by the Arts Advisory Commission for the City of Hamilton, the purpose of the evening […]
- Gatekeepers, Copyright and Curatorial Quandries
While there have been numerous developments as a consequence of Diana Poulsen’s criticism of Vantage Art Projects, I have been content to let Diana report those updates on her own follow-up post. Even at the expense of much dramatic name-calling and editorializing of certain actionable phrases, the value of the dialogue is clearly demonstrated in […]
- Excerpt: An age of austerity for the arts
A side-effect of my recent love affair with Adrian Searle’s Private Views has been an expanded interest in the other cultural podcasts offered by The Guardian’s website. While the critical heft doesn’t quite compete with CBC’s Ideas (a long-standing favourite of mine), the series of recordings from the 2009 Cambridge Festival of Ideas have been […]
- Writing in the snow
Despite this blog’s title, neither of the two links I’m about to throw out here have anything to do with writing your name in the snow by urinating, so if you’re looking for that, you’ll have to try somewhere else.
But if you’re any sort of writer, and especially the sort of writer toiling away north […]
- The Big Picture Revisited Part Three: Engaging City Hall
My third and final post in this week’s series reporting on ‘The Big Picture Revisited’ addresses the discussion around Engaging City Hall. As this whole event was hosted by the City of Hamilton’s Arts Advisory Commission with the intention of forming an action plan within the means of municipal government, this was a topic that […]
- The Big Picture Revisited Part Two: Sustainability of Arts Organizations
Continuing from yesterday’s report on The Big Picture Revisited with a focus on Support for Individual Artists, today’s post will cover the forum’s discussion surrounding Sustainability of Arts Organizations.
In his introductory remarks on the topic, Ivan Jurakic cited an exceptional quality in the James North landscape that has intrigued me for some time now […]
- The Big Picture Revisted Part One: Support for Individual Artists
There’s something cruel in talking about artistic survival in Hamilton, particularly when the event kicks off at 9:30 in the morning and artists are made to mill about the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre dolefully slurping coffee and wondering why they’re awake, upright and wearing pants this early in the morning after an art crawl. […]
- Is that the apocalypse I hear?
It must be, because surely that isn’t Stephen Harper - Canada’s Prime Minister and he who disdains the arts with their posh red-carpet galas - showing off his musical chops at, dare I say it, a posh red-carpet gala?
Except that it is. In a move that I’m not sure whether to judge as blatant hypocrisy […]
