ArtsJournal - Newsside

Building Audiences

The Concert Refunds That Haven’t Come Yet

AUDIENCE, MUSIC Posted:

The venue claims that the refunds are the responsibility of a Russian oligarch. One fan “has spent considerable time over the last four months hunting down the money … a quest that, for her, has involved setting up a spreadsheet to track her many communications with Ticketmaster and the Nassau Coliseum.” And, well, crickets. – The New York Times

Back To The Museum – But Alas It Had Lost Its Charm

AUDIENCE, VISUAL Posted:

Phil Kennicott: “I had thought I might escape the outside world for a few hours, shut out the chaos and crisis. But in room after room, the vast majority of the objects were mute and meaningless, and only those that somehow referenced other periods of crisis spoke with clarity. I had entirely lost my ability to experience art as escape.”- Washington Post

How Online Theatre And Its Audience Are Changing Each Other

AUDIENCE, THEATRE Posted:

“Our great crisis, the coronavirus, forces us to watch plays alone, in the crannies of our homes, instead of drawing us into proximity with strangers. Our current government, unlike that led by Franklin Roosevelt, doesn’t see a connection between economic privation, social estrangement, and the kind of nourishment that can come only through an encounter with art — and has no sense of responsibility to encourage the flourishing of art and public life. And so, in a very real way, each of us is on her own. The work of playwriting, acting, and theatrical production today might be to reintroduce us to one another, one at a time.” – The New Yorker

What Small Movie Theatres Discovered After They Reopened

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

“When we opened in June I had the No. 7 theater in the country. I thought that was cool.” Yet in subsequent weeks, attendance wasn’t enough to justify keeping the lights on. After just a few weeks back in business, Chris Johnson had to make what he refers to as a “heartbreaking” decision: He closed down his theaters. He doesn’t know, realistically, when he’ll be able to welcome customers again. “We found there was a core audience who came out right away and was very excited, but those were the only ones who came out,” he said. – Variety

NPR Wants To Broaden Its Audience. What Could It Learn From The BBC?

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

“The BBC eventually had to succumb to the public’s demands to hear what it wanted, not what [BBC founder John] Reith wanted them to hear. … In the United States, public radio never attracted an audience near as diverse as NPR’s founding purposes hoped. Public radio sincerely welcomed all, but those who chose to listen represented such a narrow type that ‘NPR listener’ became a meaningful term.” – Current

Why Spotify Has Successful Artists Named ‘White Noise Baby Sleep’ And ‘Jazz Therapy For Cats’

AUDIENCE, MUSIC Posted:

“You’ve probably never heard of them, but Relaxing Music Therapy has had a pretty damn successful music career. At least, on Spotify. This ‘artist’ has more than 500,000 monthly listeners on the platform, all thanks to One Simple Trick: optimizing their name to show up prominently in Spotify’s search results.” – OneZero

Uffizi Gallery Says TikTok Has Doubled The Number Of Its Young Visitors

AUDIENCE, VISUAL Posted:

“Since moving onto multiple social media channels, including TikTok, during the lockdown, the Uffizi’s online presence has exploded. In an apparently related trend, young visitors (as a proportion of the total) have nearly doubled since the museum [in Florence] reopened over the summer.” – The Art Newspaper

Could A Drive-In ‘Nutcracker’ Work This Christmas? This Company’s Trying It

AUDIENCE, DANCE Posted:

“For five nights [Atlanta Ballet] will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on its surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces). … The film will feature the new staging of The Nutcracker, with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.” – Atlanta Journal Constitution

Online Theatre Has Become Very Creative. But Can A Model To Support It Evolve?

AUDIENCE, THEATRE Posted:

The best of them have come in the shape of theatrical activism, especially amid the Black Lives Matter movement, made cheaply and with a speed that a live theatrical production could never match. These have included a YouTube series about racism experienced by British East Asians as a result of Covid-19, the Bush theatre’s The Protest after the killing of George Floyd, and Roy Williams’s 846, all of which combined the arts, politics and activism. There has also been the Almeida’s Shifting Tides series, which focused on climate activism in audio plays made by their young actors. – The Guardian

The First Drive-In Book Festival

AUDIENCE, WORDS Posted:

“The book lovers of Appledore, a picturesque fishing village on the north Devon coast, are a resourceful, determined lot. When their library faced closure 14 years ago, they helped save it by launching a literary festival, which grew and developed year by year into one of the most popular cultural events in the south-west of England. And when the 2020 Appledore book festival was threatened with cancellation because of the COVID crisis, they came up with the bold idea of holding a coronavirus-secure drive-in event, believed to be the first in the UK.” – The Guardian

The Future Of Theatre

AUDIENCE, THEATRE Posted:

There are many ideas. Many hopes. Stephanie Ybarra of Baltimore’s Center Stage: “We will rely less on the stuff of the stage and more on the physical bodies of the performers and the words they speak or sing and the movement of those bodies.” – NPR

Can Arts Groups Successfully Charge Viewers For Online Content? And How Much?

AUDIENCE, ISSUES Posted:

“The wave of free content [put online during the COVID lockdown] was a generous gesture with some lasting side effects – not least of which is the emergence of a price anchor, an expectation that digital culture is somehow free to produce and therefore free to watch. This will take some time to shake off.” Here’s an analysis – with some surprises, both happy and worrisome – of data from a recent survey of more than 130,000 regular arts attenders in the UK. – Arts Professional

‘Tenet’ Was Hollywood’s Great Hope To Revive American Moviegoing. It Didn’t.

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

It worked overseas: the Warner Bros. blockbuster has grossed $207 million altogether, but less than $30 million of that has been in the U.S. Worse, the much-touted $20 million first-weekend domestic gross turns out to have been heavily padded. These figures are scaring studios off their major release schedules. “Now the question isn’t whether theaters can return to normalcy,” writes David Sims, “but whether they can survive this pandemic at all.” – The Atlantic

As Ever More Viewing Happens Online, Will The French Drift Away From Dubbed Films And TV?

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

“As streaming platforms take over more and more of the screen time in France, some fear the curtain will fall over the French dubbing industry as more people get used to watching subtitled versions of films rather than the VF (version française).” In fact, the voice-over/dubbing industry is growing, with demand for its services high. Here’s why. – The Local (France)

Goodreads Is A Hopeless, Malfunctioning Mess. Is There Another Option?

AUDIENCE, WORDS Posted:

The site was a great idea when it was launched in 2007; by 2013, when Amazon bought it, there were 15 million users. But the new owners seem to have done little with it: users frequently can’t find titles they want or get messages sent to other members; the site design “is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page”; Amazon either can’t or hasn’t bothered to create an algorithm that doesn’t spit out countless irrelevant recommendations. “But new competitors continue to enter the book-tech fray, and one in particular is beginning to make waves.” – New Statesman

Time To Stop Apologizing For Online Performances And Start Turning Them Into A New Genre

AUDIENCE, ISSUES Posted:

Peter Dobrin: “We should think of this as a research-and-development phase long overdue. Online performances won’t sink or swim based on how well they replicate live ones. … More important … is the question of whether a new breed of production designers and directors can give viewer-listeners something different from live performance.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

BBC Gets 15,000 Complaints After Dance Group’s BLM Performance

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

The dance group, who won the talent show in 2009, took to the stage with a politically charged performance during the ITV show’s semi-finals this month. It depicted a white police officer kneeling on the Diversity star and temporary BGT judge Ashley Banjo, echoing the killing of the unarmed black man George Floyd in the US. – The Guardian

First Hollywood Blockbuster “Tenet” Earns $2000M Worldwide, Only $6.6M In US

AUDIENCE, MEDIA Posted:

The time-bending sci-fi thriller Tenet generated $6.7 million in the U.S. and Canada during its second weekend of release, representing a 29% drop compared to opening weekend. Initially, Warner Bros., the studio behind “Tenet,” touted a $20 million debut. But a closer dissection of those numbers reveal they were heavily spun to include weekday preview screenings and the long holiday weekend. In reality, “Tenet” only made about $9 million between Friday and Sunday. – Variety