Live events and entertainment are people-based businesses that rely on the creation of emotional experiences and human interactions. Shedding too many employees, or the wrong employees, may impede the ability to resume operations when the crisis ends. – The Conversation
The Drum Dance Group That Isn’t Letting A Little Thing Like Social Distance Get In The Way
The group is called Huqqullaaqatigiit, and the drum dancers have been getting together every week for more than a decade to preserve language, music, and the words of elders in the community. Last week, they decided to try it all over Facebook Live. – CBC
How Podcasting Is Changing
The podcasting business is changing at the speed of sound. There’s a pivot toward profit. And while that’s great in the short run for public podcasting, it also attracts new players and an aggressive new business model. Public podcasts that often started as spinoffs or experiments are becoming lucrative. NPR recently projected that podcasting would account within three years for 20% of its revenues. In public-broadcasting–adjacent venues, The Daily reportedly made millions last year, and Slate draws half its revenue from podcasting. – Current
Public Radio And TV Stations Are Having To Rework Their Underwriting Models — Fast
Cultural institutions and restaurants, whose revenue has been largely wiped out by the coronavirus epidemic, have been among the biggest underwriters of local public media outlets. Reporter Julian Wyllie looks into how several local stations are dealing with the sudden changes in their sponsors’, and their own, fortunes. – Current
Libraries As ‘Second Responders’ In The COVID Crisis
“When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it. You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising.” Deborah Fallows gives some examples of what they’re doing. – The Atlantic
When COVID Shut This Small Museum Down, Its Community Suffered A Big Loss
“In the eight years since it was founded, the Underground Museum has become not only one of the most important destinations for black art in the country but also a crucial gathering place for its working class Arlington Heights neighborhood [in Los Angeles]. … As cultural institutions all over the world wrestle with how to bring art to the public during the pandemic, smaller ones like the Underground Museum are also trying to figure out how to continue serving communities that have come to rely on them in other ways.” – The New York Times
It Took Only Four Days For Berlin To Distribute €500 Million In Emergency Funds For Freelancers
“Imagine you are a small businessperson or freelancer suffering a deep financial loss as a result of your city’s lockdown. You apply for a grant from the government on a Friday, submitting nothing more than your mailing address, a tax number, banking details, and a legal form with your company’s name. On Tuesday, you wake up to find €5,000 has been wired into your account.” – Artnet
Soooo… We Were Trying To Cut Down Our Screen Time Before This Happened. How’s It Going?
Covered in screens these past few weeks, I have noticed some positive changes. I FaceTime my friends so much that I know them better than I did before. I decided to learn what TikTok was, and I love it. I spend hours with my chin tucked into my chest and a weird smile on my face, watching. I’m using Duolingo, an app to learn languages. – The New York Times
Chinese Movie Fans Turned To Piracy Sites As Theatres Shut
China’s 70,000 theaters shut down in January amid coronavirus concerns during the weekend of the Chinese New Year, which is typically the country’s busiest moviegoing time. Piracy data company Muso released a report on Wednesday that shows how piracy has already increased in the region because of the closures. – Business Insider
Major Development In A Landmark Decision About Artists Rights
“At issue is the aspect of copyright law that allows authors to terminate copyright grants to publishers. The putative class action was brought by John Waite and Joe Ely, musicians who alleged that Universal Music Group routinely and systematically refuses to honor termination notices. The judge is allowing a group of plaintiffs to move forward, but not without a pretty huge caveat.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Classical Music Is Thriving As We Quarantine Ourselves
Locked out of the concert hall because of global coronavirus concerns, endangered in physical and financial terms, classical music is fighting to survive and finding more paths than ever to listeners. Part of this phenomenon is that we’re quite literally a captive audience. But another part is the odd compatibility between classical music and digital media. – Washington Post
The Music Schools That Were Quite Prepared For Distance Learning
Unlike so many other institutions, the major music schools of America were uniquely prepared to make the transition to online instruction. The fact is, they’ve been preparing for it for years by enhancing and expanding their Wi-Fi capabilities, installing and becoming adept at the use of multiple learning and communication platforms, developing and honing online teaching skills, all while working with a student body that is totally comfortable with the relationship between education and online technology. – San Francisco Classical Voice
How Can A Director Shoot A Thriller While Maintaining Social Distancing? Put The Lead Actor Inside A Video Game
“Timur Bekmambetov, best known outside Russia for making the Angelina Jolie thriller Wanted, was midway through filming his second world war fighter-ace film V2: Escape from Hell when the coronavirus pandemic broke. So [he] sanitised his shooting schedule and, last week, pulled off what he believes was a cinematic first: a feature-film scene shot entirely inside a live video game.” – The Guardian
Chloe Aaron, Who Molded PBS Into A National Network, Dead At 81
She helped create the series Live From Lincoln Center, Dance in America, and Live From the Metropolitan Opera. And in 4½ years as PBS’s senior vice president for programming in the late 1970s (she was then the highest-ranking woman in American television), she convinced the various local member stations to carry the same prime-time programming for four evenings a week — giving PBS a national identity as a network for the first time. – The New York Times
The Culture We’re Losing Beyond The Non-Profits
Los Angeles is full of odd and quirky cultural enterprises, many of them precarious in the best of times. Mandatory closures that may extend for weeks, if not months, might end up converting temporary shutdowns into the permanent closures of some of Southern California’s most overlooked fountains of culture and history. – Los Angeles Times
Jerry Saltz Obsesses On Bruegel’s Vast Vista Of Mass Death
“This is Pieter Bruegel’s circa 1562 world-masterpiece painting The Triumph of Death, a panoramic pandemonium of an army of skeletons laying waste to a barren burning landscape while murdering every human being in sight. Lately, I have spent so much time contemplating this painting, I feel I have almost been living inside it.” – New York Magazine
Not That It Matters Much At The Moment, But Here Is The List Of 2019’s Most Popular Museums
And shows, where a Dreamworks show took honors. Repeating this year as most-trafficked museum is the Louvre in Paris, which welcomed 9.6 million visitors, easily beating No. 2, the National Museum in Beijing. – The Art Newspaper
Inside The War Room: NY Arts Orgs Deal With Catastrophe
As the covid-19 disease has escalated, turning New York into a crisis epicenter, the resolve of a multibillion-dollar arts community has intensified to try to temper panic and pool advice. And what was once a routine monthly call among 34 arts and cultural organizations that receive significant money from the city has ballooned into a daily emergency call-in with as many as 170 anxious arts administrators and advocates. – Washington Post
The Choreography Of Social Distancing
“In this time of confinement, we have been given one immeasurable gift — the freedom to go outside. In exchange, we must abide by a simple rule: Stay six feet away from others. As choreographic intentions go, that’s not remotely vague. Yet during my runs and walks in Brooklyn over the past few days, I’ve noticed that six feet doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.” Gia Kourlas looks at how (and why) social distancing plays out as it does — and gives instructions to the more oblivious among us. – The New York Times
Attendance At Public Events May Not Recover Post-Pandemic: Study
“In a survey of 1,000 consumers in the U.S., 44% of respondents said they would attend fewer large public events, even once they are cleared by the CDC, with 38% saying they’d attend about the same number … And 47% agreed that the idea of going to a major public event ‘will scare me for a long time.'” (They’re most leery of theme parks and indoor concert and sports venues.) – Variety
Playwrights Talk About How Their Dystopian Scripts Look Now That We’re Amidst A Plague
Alexis Soloski: “You could fill a shelf with plays of the past several decades that have dreamed bleak outcomes for humanity. And then, in a pinch, you could burn that shelf and those plays for warmth. Recently, I spoke with several playwrights — via telephone and email — about what it is like to first imagine a cataclysm and then live through one.” (And then there’s this playwright, who picked the wrong time to premiere her play about the Spanish flu.) – The New York Times
Philadelphia Orchestra Gets Pay Cuts But No Job Losses
“Players voted last week to approve an across-the-board 20% reduction in compensation starting April 1 and lasting through the middle of September. Pay cuts have also been instituted for orchestra staff on a sliding scale up to 20% depending on salary level, and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin will give up at least 20% of his paycheck.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Week After Getting A $25 Million Grant, Kennedy Center Lays Off 250 Staffers
The five-week furloughs, announced days after all National Symphony musicians were laid off with a week’s notice, cover administrative employees in education, marketing, and development as well as the NSO and Washington National Opera. Said CEO Deborah Rutter, “My hope is that we won’t have to do too many more.” – The Washington Post
Kennedy Center Defends Its $25 Million Bailout Amid Major Layoffs
Facing serious criticism for the furloughs — one congressman introduced a bill to rescind the $25 million, saying “if an organization is receiving assistance from the federal government, we expect them to take care of their workers” — management offered a breakdown of how the grant would be spent and said that, even with the extra money, the Center could run out of cash by July. – The New York Times
Bayreuth Festival 2020 Canceled Due To Coronavirus
This summer’s event would have included the premiere of a new Ring cycle staged by Valentin Schwarz with Pietari Inkinen conducting; that production will “probably” be postponed until 2022. Tickets for this year’s festival will be honored in 2021. – Opera News