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 business. But when a Broadway show becomes a runaway hit, it really hits. Enter “Hamilton”, which is poised to make enormous amounts of money and will be big business. Here’s an insightful look into the business of a Broadway success.
- Why “creativity” and “innovation” WON’T make you successful: It’s sexy. It’s interesting. But our obsession with creating and innovating and imagining that these are the only keys to success could be a problem. It’s a mindset that can skew who wins and who loses.
- Will artificial intelligence redefine how we think about art? If art is a distillation of experience, a way of interpreting, an inspired observation, a skilled expression, a unique insight, then how are we going to regard artificial intelligence when it starts creating? Already, it’s difficult to distinguish between music produced by machines and music made by humans. And then there’s this from Smithsonian magazine: Scientists had a computer create a painting “using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s work. Over the course of 18 months, a group of engineers, Rembrandt experts and data scientists analyzed 346 of Rembrandt’s works, then trained a deep learning engine to ‘paint’ in the master’s signature style.”
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