Posts tagged "Art"
Art Into Politics
Aug 10, 2015 • 6 min read
New York University offers a course, Master of Arts in Arts Politics. "The politics that makes art. The politics that art makes.....Arts politics attends to both formal and informal political processes that bear on the production, dissemination, and reception of the arts. It integrates approaches from the humanities, social sciences, and the arts themselves. It studies governmental and policy processes and the institutional ecology and political economy of the arts. It employs perspectives that understand how to decode cultural meanings, how social movements are formed, and how to read the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Through official patronage and censorship, celebration and loathing, affirmation and critique of prevailing values, art has long been imbricated and implicated in the political. Yet arts politics is never fixed; its historical and cross-cultural variations help us understand what possibilities exist for civically engaged artists working in the present."
Let There Be Lighght
Dec 18, 2014 • 6 min read
lighght. Seven letters which made poetic history. Seven letters typed out on a sheet of paper by Aram Saroyan. “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process,” says Saroyan, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California. 'Lighght' first appeared in The Chicago Review and later was featured in 'The American Literary Anthology', where it ran for seven pages, with one letter on each page. When the poem received $ 750 from the National Endowment for the Arts, there had been a huge uproar about wasting government funds, and there had been a letter from a taxpayer "We can't afford to lower taxes but we can pay some beatnik weirdo $ 500 to write one word..and not even spell it right." (Saroyan received $ 500 out of the 750 from the publisher).