Cultural Capital: Arts

Stroll into the courtyard of London's Somerset House over the next few weeks and you'll come face-to-face with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals.

The giant bronze heads, which represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac - rabbit, goat, rat, tiger and so on - are arranged in a semi-circle on six- foot poles.The symmetry is pleasing, and there's ample space to walk around each head in deep contemplation (if ... read more

"Public money will no longer be given to arts organisations simply because they hire a high proportion of women or ethnic minorities, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned," reports the Daily Mail.

And here were we at the Asian theatre company Tamasha, labouring under the misapprehension for these last 21 years that the Arts Council fund us because we stage plays ... read more

You'd expect the tabloids to belittle the government's commitment to the arts, but from the Guardian it just sounds weird. In a blog headlined "Don't vote for 'arts policy'", Jonathan Jones argues: "At these kinds of times, when the nation's future is held in the electoral balance, you realise exactly how silly and trivial the media fiction of 'the arts' actually is." He concludes his piece with the ... read more

The Institute of Contemporary Arts, founded in 1948, has promoted some of the most exciting arts movements of the postwar period, so the news last month of its financial crisis was disappointing, to say the least.

The crisis, a deficit of £600,000 that will result in redundancies for a third of the ICA's 60-strong staff and could even lead to its closure, has been explained as an unfortunate consequence of ... read more

We're delighted to make room in The Critics in this week's New Statesman for an exclusive short story by the novelist Hari Kunzru. "The Culture House" is a parable of sorts, a reminder that the decade we've just lived through was defined in part by the annexation of the art world by high finance. Here, the narrator describes the fate of the work of a dead painter ... read more