This Week: Are internships hurting progress in the arts?… Ten things that might improve the audience experience… Is elitism or populism a bigger threat to the arts?… The digital versus paper book experience… How ignorance spreads.
- You Want Diversity In The Arts? Maybe Look At Internships? The arts industry is heavily dependant on cheap labor provided through internships. But those who are able to take internships have to be well off enough to subsidize them. “The fact that internships are so prevalent in the creative industries is concerning, because the creative workforce lacks ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, particularly at entry level. If internships without measures to ensure equal access are common, there is a risk that the diversity of the sector will suffer.” Why is this an audience issue? How can arts organizations expect to attract more diverse audiences if those working in the organizations aren’t diverse?
- Ten Things That Turn Off Audiences (We Should Change Them Right Now): GP McLeer reels off a list that focuses on the audience experience: “After being in this field for a hot second, there are just some things that I think are impeding our ability, as an industry, to become more self-sustaining, attract new and younger audiences, and make the arts experience much better for the audience and/or consumer. These are ideas, traditions, thoughts – or ‘institutional traditions’ – that have somehow become the ‘norm’ in our industry and create an environment where we value the tradition over the audience experience – our ‘user interface’.” Scott Chamberlain vigorously disagrees at Mask of the Flower Prince: “I just don’t think this list will go very far in addressing the questions the field needs to grapple with, and I don’t know that they speak to the question of relevancy.”
- Elitism Or Populism – Which Is The Bigger Problem For The Arts? Is this a useful binary? “Those of a populist mind-set attack so-called elitist art forms as boring; those of an elitist mind-set attack so-called populist art forms as facile and unworthy. But in either case, it’s usually the mind-set, not the work itself, that raises hackles.” Adam Kirsch: “The truth is, however, that few writers ever make a conscious choice between elitism and populism, difficulty and accessibility. Writers write as their minds and fates compel them to.”
- Digital Versus Print – We Need To Understand The Differences: The question is how it influences how we read as well as what we read. “There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.”
- How Does Ignorance Flourish? Robert Proctor studies it. Our culture is now so flooded with information, it’s become more and more of a challenge to sort and organize quality. But maybe quality is not the measure that many are using. Proctor explains that “ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless, and is used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.” In other words – in a time of Big Information it might be easier to manipulate ignorance than ever before.
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