Today’s Stories
CEO Exit Interview: A Model That No Longer Works
Arti Prashar: “We operate in a climate where we have been asked to grow and grow, following a business model that just doesn’t work for the arts – of seeking bigger turnover and bigger and wider audiences. We need a mixed economy – always have, always will. I hear of many venues and organisations running huge deficits – how are they going to plug those holes?” – Arts Professional
UK Study: Businesses Are Not Investing In The Arts
Fewer than one-third of businesses do. “Most individuals surveyed by the funder wanted more cultural opportunities where they live (55%), but businesses were less enthusiastic: they prioritised other spending, felt local arts groups were “not business minded enough”, and didn’t see how investing in arts and culture would benefit them.” – Arts Professional
The Increasingly Oh-So-Complicated Politics Of The Politics Of Arts Organization Donors
“You don’t want to have either Fox or MSNBC after you. Those are huge distractions of the time of individual board members and senior management.” – The New York Times
Russian Literature And The Meaning Of Truth
“We usually assume that literature exists to depict life, but Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature. Russians, of course, excel in ballet, chess, theater, and mathematics. They invented the periodic table and non-Euclidian geometry. Nevertheless, for Russians literature is in a class by itself. The very phrase “Russian literature” carries a sacramental aura.” – New Criterion
The New Streaming Reality Is Looking More And More Like The Bad Old Days Of TV
The rise of digital video is bringing back more than just bloated bundles and bills. Many companies are returning to TV’s original business model: selling you anything and everything but the television show in front of you. – The New York Times
How “Sesame Street” Revolutionized Teaching Using Music
Since its inception in 1969, the public television show has redefined what it means to teach children through TV, with music as its resounding voice. Before “Sesame Street,” it wasn’t even clear that you could do that; once the series began, as a radical experiment that joined educational research and social idealism with the lunacy of puppets and the buoyancy of advertising jingles, it proved that kids are very receptive to a grammar lesson wrapped in a song. – The New York Times
Conductor Leo Driehuys, 87 – He Built The Modern Charlotte Symphony
“He was a very strong face for the Charlotte Symphony, but he worked his butt off behind the scenes with the power players in Charlotte. He got people to realize that this was something important to put money into because it was good for the city.” – Charlotte Observer
The Joys Of Traveling From Small Town To Small Town Performing Shakespeare For High Schoolers For $225 A Week (A Reminiscence)
“As a recent graduate with a BFA in acting, I could have been stuck lip-synching to Buddy Holly at an amusement park or being cast as a Native American in a problematic outdoor drama in Chillicothe, Ohio. But here I was doing something respectable; noble, even.” Jeremy D. Larson recalls the three-hour load-ins for 8 a.m. shows. The flu passed from cast member to cast member when no one could sit out a show. The drink and drugs. The streaking. And the time they made the mistake of uttering the title of The Scottish Play out loud – The Outline
Fascinating Rights Issue: After Dispute, Taylor Swift Says She’ll Re-Record Her Early Albums
The singer reached an impass with her recording label, which owns masters of the original songs. So Swift says she’ll simply re-record them all so she has control. Travis Andrews untangles the copyright implications. – Washington Post
Comfort Reading: In Defense Of Returning To The Same Book Over And Over
Rebecca Jennings — who confesses to having read each of the Harry Potter books at least ten times and insists she’s “not advocating for laziness” — points to research on “repeated hedonic experiences” that explains why those repeated experiences are hedonic (that means pleasurable) and, in fact, good for you. – Vox
Cruising For Art – The Bizarro World Of Cruise Ship Art Auctions
One gimmick in particular stood out: A pair of works presented turned away from the audience, and sold as one lot, without any idea of what they looked like. “They are going to be two of the most gorgeous works of art that anyone has ever seen,” Borotescu promised the audience. “Once you turn it around, if it’s something you don’t like, you don’t have to keep it.” – artnet
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Orbit’ — AKA Boris Johnson’s Giant Erector-Set/Sliding Board — Is Millions In Debt
The 376-foot sculpture was commissioned by Johnson, then London’s Mayor, for the 2012 Olympics, and he had hoped that it would become London’s answer to the Eiffel Tower (7 million annual visitors) or the Statue of Liberty (over 4 million). But Orbit never even cracked the 200,000-visitor mark — not even after it was bailed out by tycoon Lakshmi Mittal (which is why it’s now named ArcelorMittal Orbit) and Johnson had Carsten Höller add a sliding tube for which admission is now £17.50 ($21). (Maybe that’s why visitorship is down more than 20% from its peak.) Total debt on the contraption is now £13 million ($15.7 million). – Artnet
UK Entertainment Unions Lament Decline In Arts Journalism
The letter states that recent job losses for arts critics at the Guardian and the Evening Standard highlight this issue. It goes on to quote figures from the List magazine that reveal the number of reviews in eight major national and arts titles dropped from 5,134 in 2012 to 3,169 in 2017. – The Stage
Inside India’s First-Ever Contemporary Sculpture Park
At the Madhavendra Palace, just outside Jaipur, “floral murals, elaborate arches, patterned columns, dark paneled doors, and stone-lined courtyards serve as maximal backdrops for sculptures — many of them site-specific — that simultaneously respond to the environment and introduce challenging new ideas into the space. Beauty and contemporary politics collide in room after room; visits to the palace become opulent treasure hunts.” – Artsy
We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age
There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus
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Executive Director – Louisville Ballet
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Netflix India Has Its Own Version Of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
“It’s 2047, 100 years after India’s independence, and in the fictional nation of Aryavarta, water is scarce. The republic’s authoritarian rulers are seizing children of mixed parentage from their families, interning the mothers, and forcibly reprogramming them to serve the nation and to purify their defiled minds. … While it has drawn parallels with The Handmaid’s Tale thanks to its depiction of a draconian, patriarchal state suppressing women and restricting their reproductive rights, Leila‘s central themes also include climate change and a deeply hierarchical society organised according to religion, caste and wealth.” – BBC
Are We Reaching The Point Where Dancers Need Big Social Media Followings Just To Get Hired?
“New York City-based choreographer and director Jennifer Weber once worked on a project with a strict social media policy: ”Hire no one with less than 10K, period’ — and that was a few years ago,’ she says. ‘Ten thousand is a very small number now, especially on Instagram.’ … It’s unsurprising that profit-driven dance enterprises lead the pack when it comes to leveraging artists’ exposure; policies at nonprofit dance organizations are generally less defined or even in place. (Multiple major ballet companies declined to speak with us on the record for this story.)” – Dance Magazine
Audience Talks And Talkbacks, And Keeping Them On Track
Says the former director of public programming at Lincoln Center, who has moved on to a new arts center in Abu Dhabi, “I’m someone who dreaded talkbacks and Q&As. While I was in New York, a lot of the time it was just audience members trying to show off how smart they were.” Journalist Zachary Whittenburg talks with presenters and artists about how they direct the focus of audience engagement events. – Dance Magazine
The Access Conundrum At The Heart Of Popular Music Journalism
There are more and more outlets, but they pay writers less and less; there are huge quantities of new music pouring out, but large bodies of readers are going to click on pieces about artists they’ve already heard of; those famous artists have less and less time to make themselves available to journalists, whom they no longer need to reach their fans. Jeremy Gordon looks at this conundrum and seeks a way beyond it. – Columbia Journalism Review
L.A.’s Flagship Arts Complex Was Built As A Shining, And Remote, City-On-A-Hill. Will Its Redesigned Central Plaza Make It More Welcoming?
“We shouldn’t be a white castle on the hill. Our new vision is about deepening the cultural life of every resident in the county. That is a very outward vision,” says Los Angeles Music Center CEO Rachel Moore. Carolina Miranda looks at the Music Center plaza’s new redesign — “less a full-blown re-do than a careful surgical intervention” — and whether it will serve that vision. – Los Angeles Times
Female Comics Are Taking On A Previously Off-Limits Topic: Abortion
“Given the trend over the last few years to use comedy as therapy, to use laughter to counterpoint pain, a complicated subject like abortion is no less likely to be a topic for comedy than mental health, toxic masculinity or sexual abuse. … [And] in the face of [a wave of restrictionist] legislation, comedy is being used as a weapon.” – BBC
Saying He No Longer Feels Welcome As A Refugee, Ai Weiwei Is Leaving Germany For Britain
“[The dissident artist] said he initially chose Germany after leaving China as it had worked so hard for his freedom, but now felt that Germany had changed and he was once again an exile. ‘Today, due to the political conditions in China, I have again been forced out,’ he said, accusing Europe of pandering to Beijing on human rights so as to win more business.” – Thomson Reuters
Alex Ross: Why “Salome” Is My Favorite Opera
“To say that Richard Strauss’s “Salome” is your favorite opera is a bit like saying that “The Shining” is your favorite film or that Edgar Allan Poe is your favorite author: it marks you as something of a freak.” – The New Yorker
Fascinating To Contemplate What We Define As “World Literature” (We Read So Little Of It)
“World literature happens when Russian novels remake English literature; when a Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer; when Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry. It almost always involves re-interpretation and misunderstanding: a Spanish monk sent to suppress Aztec literature ended up disseminating it instead; subsequently, Aztec hymns envision a Christian God urging revolt against the Spaniards. World literature is also nothing new under the sun.” – Harvard Magazine
Artists Take Over Power Station And Make Art That Generates Power
The contemporary arts centre E-Werk Luckenwalde will not only open exhibition galleries and studio spaces in a former brown coal power station 65km south of Berlin, it will also begin generating carbon-neutral electricity. Led by the artist Pablo Wendel and the curator Helen Turner, E-Werk Luckenwalde will power its own building with locally sourced biomass and sell the excess energy back to the grid to fund the whole enterprise. – The Art Newspaper