This Week’s Insights: Have we “engaged” with audiences to the detriment of leading them?… Rotten Tomatoes as whipping boy of criticism… Why are museums charging scholars for images?… Should artists care where their audiences see them?
- Create Audiences Or Engage Them? In this year of ascending populism in politics, many are looking at the phenomenon and examining the relationship between leadership and following the crowd. There are some lessons to be learned in the arts as well. “In many institutions the focus on popularizing the programs is so big that one wonders whether the emphasis is still on the art that is being shown, or on the mediation between the art and the audience. There has been a shift from what is being shown to how something is being communicated. Yet this communication is often bypassing or reducing what the artistic work is about.” Is this a variation on the old theme of lead or follow? Or is it something new?
- Rotten Tomatoes As Whipping Boy Of Criticism: A few weeks ago Martin Scorsese blamed the movie review aggregator for some of what ails the movie industry. Movie studios piled on, blaming RT for crowd-driven dismissals of worthy movies. Now charges that the site soft-peddled negative reviews of Justice League so the ratings wouldn’t suppress opening weekend box office. Why would it do that? RT is partly-owned by Warner Bros., which produced the superhero flick. Boy, it sure gets complicated on the field of crowd ratings these days… Question: do audiences care?
- Should Museum Images Be Free? There’s a growing backlash from researchers and publishers against the fees museums are charging to publish images from their collections. Such fees can add up to thousands of dollars in a scholarly book. Scholars say that such fees are endangering scholarship, making it prohibitively expensive to include images for books which have only a limited market. Reproduction fees help fund museums, but these are public institutions and should they be making money off scholarship? Moreover – art which is older than 70 years old is out of copyright, so there’s a question whether museums still control the images. Perhaps the biggest issue: are museums allowing the need for income to suppress dissemination of images which help build an audience for and support of artists work?
- Do You Care Where Your Audience Watches? One of the concerns of artists about making performances available online is that it presents a “lesser” experience of their art. There’s an idea that the best (and only?) way to convey art to people is in the best venue for it – the concert hall, museum or theatre. Mediated by a screen, you can’t control the conditions by which it is viewed. So here’s some data to back that up. Netflix reports that “about 12 per cent of Americans who watch television shows or movies outside of the home admit to having done so in a public restroom. And 37 per cent say they’ve watched at work.” So a question: do we care?
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