1. This week in What-Does-The-Audience-Want?- Cheaper tickets, for sure. Or at least the opportunity to pay what they want. One theatre converted its season to pay-as-you-want and saw a 50% increase in audience.
- But perhaps it’s frustrating that people don’t see more people like themselves on stages. “One of my frustrations with what happens on the stage a lot of the time when working class people are put up there, it’s like poverty porn. They’re laughed at, or they’re the villains, or they’re ridiculous.”
- Theatre-as-Teacher: Hamilton is being used in classrooms to teach history. “Yes, it takes creative liberties—the Founding Fathers didn’t really spit rhymes or use phrases like ‘John Adams shat the bed’—but the story is historically sound.”
- Not Your Parents’ Library: Libraries Across America Have Reinvented Themselves “There are three areas where libraries function as vibrant centers of America’s towns: technology, education, and community.”
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Reading Is Back. Yay! But Let’s Not Put Down Complicated Critiques Replaced By New Enthusiasm That reading is now a social activity again… might seem cause for optimism. Yet D.J. Taylor regrets the passing of critical arbitration in matters of taste. - How The Smithsonian Is Using Crowdsourcing To Transcribe History
- Don’t get the play you just saw? Don’t worry about it: “It’s liberating for a theatregoer not to worry too much whether you’ve worked out exactly what it’s about. If you want to solve something, buy a Rubik’s Cube, not a theatre ticket.
- In defense of pretentiousness: It is axiomatic that pretentiousness makes no one look good. But pretension is measured using prejudiced metrics.”
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Studies: Creative Brains Work Differently “The common traits that people across all creative fields seemed to have in common were an openness to one’s inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity… -
- ‘Our onslaught of Images is changing our perceptions: “As we snap, store and communicate with thousands of images on our phones and computers, a number of researchers and theorists are already beginning to point to some of the unintended consequences of this ‘image overload,’ which range from heightened anxiety to memory impairment.”
- Mindlessly Engaged? What Happens To Culture When We’re Addicted To Our Devices“What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines?
- How Do you Build A Critical Life As Part Of A Creative Life?
- Do Critics (Should They) Have Power? (Or Is It Illusion?)
- High Five! On The Nature Of Awesomeness And Suckiness Philosopher Nick Riggle explains why being awesome doesn’t simply mean excellence and someone or something isn’t merely bad when it sucks.
- “The problem with collecting masterworks of great artists is that the act of ownership is in itself a kind of theft, stealing from the public commons of genius.”
4. The Business/Impacts of the Arts
- An Arts Revolution Is Transforming Small Cities James Fallows writes, “Perhaps the topic on which I’ve most changed my mind through our travels concerns the civic importance of local arts, and the energy being devoted to them across the country. Almost every place we visited offers an example.”
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TV (Unlike The Movies) Has Figured Out That Diversity Is Smart Business “That audience wants authenticity; advertisers want that audience.” - An argument for the moral authority to “liberate” (steal) the world’s research papers.
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