Guess Who’s Performing At the White House?

July 21, 2010 by Molly Sheridan

To showcase nation’s arts, first lady isn’t afraid to spotlight the unexpected

Besides the warm and fuzzy feeling it might give us (hey, who doesn’t like to read that famous people agree with them?), what kind of public relations and/or political influence does this kind of activity and attendant media coverage accomplish for the cause of the performing arts in America? Several of the folks chatting over on this week’s special AJ Creative Rights and Artists blog have mentioned that we may not be the best people to work on public policy/legislative changes and perhaps our quite limited resources would be better placed elsewhere. But it makes me wonder: Do Michele Obama’s actions carry any real impact, or are they just a nice story for the Arts & Living section?

Mind the Gap

Great performances have nothing to do with how many Facebook friends you have, but in today's cultural marketplace it can certainly feel that way. In the performing arts, we spend a lot of time obsessing over the hurdles we feel we need to overcome in order to connect performances with audiences. Age gaps. Genre gaps. Economic, social, and technological gaps. But are we trying to close the gaps we see by transforming our presentations, our marketing, and even our art in ways we haven't

Molly Sheridan

Molly Sheridan is a writer, editor, and producer specializing in classical and experimental music, with a focus on multimedia content designed for the web. A winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for music journalism, she’s executive editor of NewMusicBox and CounterstreamRadio, both programs of New Music USA.

She hosted Carnegie Hall’s Sound Insights podcasts and online artist interviews and her writing has appeared in publications such as TimeOut, The Washington Post, and theÂ occasionalÂ concert program.Â She attended the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University, earning a bachelor’s in journalism with a specialization in violin performance and French in 1999.

She currently divides her time between New York City and Baltimore, where she lives with her husband, the saxophonist Brian Sacawa, and cooks for Wonderland Kitchen.