Archives for April 2016

This week: Do the Met Museum's financial woes say anything about today's museum business? Who wants to see art in mobbed museums anyway? Prince's career as a control freak. A realignment of power in cities. And diversity as fetish object. Met Versus MoMA: Lessons About Popular Taste In The Balance Sheets? Last week the Metropolitan Museum announced a deficit of about $10 million and plans to … [Read more...]

This week, a groundbreaking deal for Broadway actors and dancers, James Levine finally decides to retire from the Met Opera, a debacle at the National Ballet of Romania that quickly escalated to involve the country's Prime Minister, a warning about fetishizing "creativity" as the key to success, and a cautionary question about what machine intelligence might look like. James Levine finally … [Read more...]

What business success in theatre looks like, our over-obsession with creativity as a catch-all answer to success, how the art markets really work, how taste gets confused with pretension, and machines' inroads to art. Theatre is a big gamble but when it hits it REALLY hits: We're used to being dazzled by the huge budgets and box office of movies. Theatre not so much. Mostly, theatre is a risky … [Read more...]

A number of stories this week tackled the meaning of greatness in art (even if they didn't explicitly frame it that way). A changing culture requires changing definitions of greatness, but defining "great" has often been problematic. Wealthy patrons have funded great art throughout history. And of course the wealthy have had many different reasons for their patronage. One of the strongest was … [Read more...]