This Week: What exactly does cultural equity actually mean?... In our social media world everything is about images... A cautionary tale as an artist is erased from the internet... There's a difference between culture and art... Why Italy fought to keep Venice off the endangered list. A Good Survey Of Debates About Cultural Equity: The crew over at Createquity have written a comprehensive … [Read more...]
Artists Erased From The Web And Our Growing Problem With Facts
Artist and author Dennis Cooper got his blog back this week. Google had suddenly removed the 14-year-old blog a few months ago without warning and had refused to answer Cooper's repeated attempts to find out why. After the takedown got attention "from international media outlets, a statement of support from PEN America and a petition to recover the blog," Google finally responded to Cooper's … [Read more...]
TV Dying, Video Streaming Surging – So This Is How People Are Getting Their News (Uh-Oh)
A flood of stories this week show how TV is dying and video is on the rise. You think changing audience behavior is tough on arts organizations? Try it when you're a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like NBCUniversal Comcast or Verizon. Olympics TV ratings were down 18% from 2012. NBC had paid $1.23 billion for rights to the broadcast MTV Video Awards ratings this week fell 30 percent … [Read more...]
In The Church Of Big Data, Artistic Judgment Is Just A Data Point
A piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times this weekend delves into our fascination with Big Data. The tech industry has made so many billions of dollars being able to track, quantify and insert itself into our behavior that many have signed on as adherents to the Church of Big Data. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised … [Read more...]
What Happens When Critical Opinion Separates From The Audience?
Three stories this week get to the heart of the question. First, the BBC polled critics worldwide and asked them what were the best 100 movies made so far in the 21st Century. Look at the list and you see something striking - the top 10 films collectively took in $213 million, or, as Barry Hertz observed in The Globe & Mail, about $50 million less than Suicide Squad made in two and a half … [Read more...]
This Week’s AJ Highlights: That Time Ballet Superstars Nureyev And Fonteyn Got Arrested In A “Hippie Raid”
This Week: Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns... Has the audience deserted blockbuster movies?... The best new beautiful library of 2016... Is it a good idea to pay young people to try culture?... When superstar dancers were arrested in a 1960s police raid. Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns: Historians fear that valuable Italian art and heritage have been destroyed by the … [Read more...]
Is Naked Trump Bad Satire? (And Do We Care?)
In this week's AJ highlights I included some of the stories we found about the naked Donald Trump statues that appeared in five American cities last week. One reader was unhappy: Vile & disgusting. This is not art nor it is political commentary. This is the second time in as many weeks Arts Journal has trashed Trump. I come here for news about classical arts and I am faced with this rubbish. … [Read more...]
Why Aren’t We Driving Self-Driving Cars Yet? It’s All About The Culture
Driverless cars are here and they work and by all accounts they make driving safer than when humans are piloting. So why aren't they already in showrooms? Not so fast. It's not just about whether they can be made and work and are safe. It's about a cultural shift that will have to take place before they are successfully sold. Like anything that's a significant part of our lives, there's a … [Read more...]
How Dance Will Help Teach Us About The Next Transformative Technology
Dance is the most physical art. Bodies moving, yes, but physical also because of how bodies relate to the spaces they're in. Much of the energy in tech innovation right now is directed to exploring the edges between physical and virtual worlds, and how we perceive spaces and interact with them. Much of the work is in new interfaces for our machines - voice control, facial recognition, biometrics, … [Read more...]
Who’s Telling Your Story? (Storytellers Are Leaders)
Last week the Brooklyn artist space National Sawdust announced it had hired away Steve Smith from the Boston Globe to start an ambitious new culture journal. Smith is a former NYTimeser, a serious journalist, and an ambitious hire. So why? According to Smith: Our new journal initiative is not meant to be an alarmed response to that changing status quo, but rather to foster awareness of the … [Read more...]
This Week In Culture – Some ArtsJournal Highlights
This Week: An artist collective skewers Trump... How Florence's Uffizi is dramatically addressing its problems... Our fetishizing of "authenticity" doesn't ring true... So what if Google is changing the way you think... An inspiring comeback after medical calamity by one of America's best musicians. The Naked Trump: Five American cities woke up this week to statues of a naked Donald Trump … [Read more...]
When All The Culture Around Us Starts To Look The Same
One of the biggest comforts of fast food is its familiarity. Generic from location to location, you know not only what the food will be and how it will taste, but that the ritual of the experience will be familiar too. It isn't that fast food people are necessarily unadventurous; but at least some of the time, they're drawn to the familiar. There's a parallel on the internet. Remember the sense … [Read more...]
Culture Trends: Five Stories From The Week’s ArtsJournal That You Shouldn’t Miss
This Week: Is the music industry's piracy war really about higher royalty payments?... There are signs the Golden Age of TV might be ending... Theatre's emotional toll on actors... LA as the next great center of contemporary music... Europe's tourist glut is damaging its great cities. Piracy Or Pay? The Music Industry's Latest War: The music industry is complaining that rampant piracy is … [Read more...]
How Do You Test For The Arts?
It's a more difficult question than you might think. There's a maxim in the education world that only subjects that are tested are funded. Thus an imperative for arts education champions to get the arts included in required standardized tests. In a STEM world, the arts don't exist. But how do you make standardized tests for the arts? Multiple choice questions might measure knowledge but do … [Read more...]
Five Essential Stories From Last Week’s ArtsJournal Haul, Context Edition
This Week: The ways in which we experience art are about to change in big ways... Auction houses are becoming shadow banks for the super-wealthy with money to stash... The Met Museum's super-successful year (at least at the admissions booth)... Predictably, Harry Potter slays sales records... Do we have a problem with the ways we develop artists' careers? How We Encounter And Experience Art … [Read more...]