Archives for 2016

This week: What ethical responsibilities do funders and funded have to one another?... The gatekeeper problem is still a thing in the internet age... What should the measure of success be in opera?... Historians are going to have a real problem documenting today's artists... Our all-image culture suggests the place of images in art may be changing. What Ethical Responsibilities Do Funders … [Read more...]

This week: Alas, hard work probably doesn't trump innate ability... It's tempting to believe extravagant claims for technology, but there are limits... Yes, by all means let's talk about equity, but be sure you know what it means... A real-world experiment in ticket pricing (and some surprising results)... The death of the mid-budget Hollywood movie. We Like The Idea That Hard Work Trumps … [Read more...]

Clearly Brexit is a cultural decision, and it will have a big impact... A new jazz scene emerges and re-energizes the art form... There's a practical reason there are so few women ballet choreographers... Christo's simple idea wows the world... Has public radio figured out a compelling future? Brexit Will Have Big Impact On Culture: The British vote to leave the European Union is a … [Read more...]

Can computers help us better understand art? What the world thinks is creative. Why is it still okay to discriminate against stupid people? How gaming is taking over. And the "Rotten Tomatoes of Books" reveals a problem with how books are reviewed. What's New In Understanding Art: How do we understand art? Of course there are the tangible technical qualities anyone can see. But there are also … [Read more...]

Maybe our biggest problem with teaching music in schools is the way we teach it. Hollywood thought making blockbusters would save it. Surprise! How charity auctions take advantage of artists. The internet is changing what we value in the world. And the wonder of Bill T. Jones... Music Teacher: We should change the way we teach music in schools Currently we teach it based on classical music … [Read more...]

A new music director for the Met Opera, and what it means. A looming college crisis and what it means. How art is changing politics. Is art driving ISIS? And flooding threatened the Louvre, D'Orsay. Metropolitan Opera Gets Its First New Music Director Since 1976: Confirming a fairly open secret, the Met chooses Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. But there are … [Read more...]

When arts planning becomes the point rather than the process. Why your creativity may be dependent on being bored. Are MFA degrees a waste of time if you want to be an artist? Broadway breaks more records. And three new ways to see traditional art. Boston Arts Plan - All Process, No Beef? The new mayor of Boston aspired to to his city being an arts town, a place where culture flourishes. So … [Read more...]

Why aren't the arts something we can all get behind? Maybe it's somewhere in the psychology of how we like what we like? Revealed: nobody reads arts reviews anymore (says an editor who hates to run them but wants to "support" the arts). Where the money is in music (hint: not for musicians). And is "This American Life" undermining public radio? Go Team! Why Don't The Arts Unite Communities … [Read more...]

Disrupting the orchestra model, doing away with artistic directors, a cure for what ails the Met Opera, how our ideas about knowledge are changing, and recreating Leonardo (no kidding!) What does Disruption Look Like In The Orchestra World? Does it seem odd that there have been so few experiments in orchestra models? Of course many of the things that make an orchestra are fixed - musicians, … [Read more...]

This week: a great example of the de-monetization of audience, the deadening burden of being a critic, some contradictions about how we use data in the arts, why technology is complicating our fetishment of original art, and remembering a time before words were processed and forever changed how we write. Cautionary Tale: I created a video. It went viral with hundreds of millions of views, but … [Read more...]

What Does "Inclusive" Mean To A Performing Arts Center? The Kennedy Center held an event to talk about inclusiveness of its offerings. But no one seemed to be able to define exactly what that means. Why is it that many in the arts believe that "inclusiveness" means getting more people to define culture the way in ways that might not feel inclusive to a lot of people? Is inclusivity merely another … [Read more...]

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...]