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Oriane Stender's avatar

Thanks, Franklin. This is the main reason I have let my New Yorker subscription lapse. Their not-so-subtle but unacknowledged slant towards all things "progressive" (in quotes because I don't think many of the positions espoused are actually progressive) has been annoying this progressive for a while now. Creative Capital is indeed a YUGE funder of identity-based artwork (and it's mostly a real snoozefest). If you're not BIPOC, anti-colonialist, LGBTQ2+LMNOP (or as one writer put it, KGBLGBTQ) neuro-divergent (or "neuro-spicy") or some other category of "disabled," and preferably a bunch of those, forget getting anything from them. Of course it's not about the work.

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Franklin Einspruch's avatar

Indeed, it's not about the work, and Shaw's appeal to beauty as a benefit of the arts makes me wonder if I have ever seen a granting organization declare a desire to foster it. The idea that antagonists should leave Creative Capital alone because of their commitment to beauty is comedic.

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Doug Bowker's avatar

Except... How's the IRS going to do much of anything after it's been gleefully de-funded by 20-something Tech Bros?

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Franklin Einspruch's avatar

Reports of the death of the IRS are greatly exaggerated.

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Douglas Bowker's avatar

Whaaaat?! You mean, we're NOT going to see a trillion dollars saved after a blizzard of indiscriminate budget cuts? Shocked, shocked I am!

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Franklin Einspruch's avatar

That we might, but it's too much to hope for the hamstringing of the IRS.

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Kevin Ray's avatar

Wow! I wonder how we can find out if the IRS will actually investigate. I applied to CC knowing my project wouldn’t advance but since it revolves around themes of depression in men I thought I’d just get it on the record that they would not green light a project that addressed an issue with a demographic they despise.

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Cinema Timshel's avatar

Thank you for writing this up. It's important stuff to document, and I'm glad to hear that some kind of legal intervention is finally taking place in the world of arts nonprofits (even if it's only a complaint from a lawyer to the IRS, and whether it accomplishes anything or not).

For anybody's who interested, here's my note from a month ago about why I didn't bother applying with Creative Capital:

https://substack.com/@cinematimshel/note/c-104191841

And my essay from September about identitarian social justice ideology in the context of nonprofits that are intended to support independent film:

https://open.substack.com/pub/cinematimshel/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently?r=16t7t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Jack Miamensis's avatar

"It all serves a non-art agenda." BINGO. And that is all I need to know to both reject and scorn it.

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Jack Miamensis's avatar

As for the New Yorker, it is and I expect always was self-consciously "with-it" and highly averse to appearing behind-the-times, as if sophistication (or the image thereof) were a moral imperative rather than a fashionable posture. I have always bristled at that attitude--maybe I'm neurodivergent.

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Jack Miamensis's avatar

Franklin, I assume you realize that if a friendship cannot survive the truth, it was doomed from the start.

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