AJ Four Ways:
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- Combating American Isolationism with Cultural Diplomacy
- Room For The Straight White Male Writer?
“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” Savage, who is 41, wrote. – The New York Times
- Eight Paris Concert Halls Most Classical Fans Never Think Of
You’ve heard of several of them — the Musée d’Orsay, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Les Invalides — but probably had no idea that they host high-level classical concerts. Others probably aren’t on your radar yet, like Bal Blomet and La Scala Paris. – Bachtrack
- There’s Another Great American Novel Whose Centennial Is This Year
“F. Scott Fitzgerald was fulsome in his praise and Sinclair Lewis declared it the ‘first book to catch Manhattan”. … As Gatsby continues to be lionised, analysed and republished — and adapted for film and the musical stage — John Dos Passos’s novel Manhattan Transfer remains a niche concern.” – Prospect (UK)
- What Theatre Tickets Cost In 2025 London
Overall average cheapest ticket to a show in London’s Theatreland district now costs £30.55, up 24.29% from the year prior. In comparison, the overall average bottom price in 2024 was just £24.58. Meanwhile, the average most expensive ticket across West End shows in 2025 cost £162.61 – 5.2% up from the 2024 figure of £154.56. – The Stage
- Neuroscience Researcher On Music As Medicine:
“We now have ample evidence that music can help treat a variety of injuries and diseases, including both mental and physical disorders. And I think the very best case is Parkinson’s disease.”
- UK Government Rejects Proposed Streaming Tax To Support UK Production
The U.K. government has firmly rejected calls for a 5% levy on streaming platforms and mandatory IP retention rules, instead emphasizing the benefits of a “mixed ecology” that welcomes both international investment and local production. – Variety
- The Revived London City Ballet: Director Christopher Marney Talks About Its Second Season
“It was fascinating to get to the end of year one and evaluate our successes and pitfalls. … We had a week of sold-out shows at the Joyce Theater in New York and then half-full houses at the Theatre Royal Windsor. It’s important to work out why that happened.” – Gramilano
- Band Accused Of Being AI After Racking Up 500k Spotify Plays
An account on X has emerged claiming to represent The Velvet Sundown. This account asserts that the band is not at all AI-generated, sharing in their account bio “Yes, We Are A Real Band & We Never Use AI.” – PCGamer
- Did A Federal Court Just Open Our Libraries Up For AI Plundering?
Let’s call this what it is: a case about borrowed books and a legal system struggling to reckon with machines that never ask before they take. – LitHub
- Why The Music Industry Seems Better-Defended Against AI
As in other creative industries, AI music tools are poised to hollow out the workaday middle of the market. Even new engineering tools have their downsides. – The Verge
- In Defense Of Rachel Zegler’s Balcony Scene In The New West End “Evita”
Many people who paid exorbitant prices to see the show in person are miffed that they’re watching “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” on a screen as Zegler sings it to crowds on the street. Writer Ellise Shafer argues that “this divisiveness is exactly the point (director Jamie) Lloyd is trying to make.” – Variety
- Report: Stressed UK Theatres Are Increasingly Playing It Safer
Local theatres are increasingly “playing safe” with their programming, resulting in more one-night events, fewer week-long runs and a significant drop in opera, ballet and contemporary dance, the findings of a new report reveal. – Arts Professional
- Gallery Powerhouse Blum Will Lay Off Staff And Close, Citing Market Downturn
Founded as Blum and Poe in 1994 in Santa Monica, Calif., by Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, the gallery represents some of the most high profile, and expensive, artists working today, including Yoshitomo Nara and Mark Grotjahn, whose artworks have traded for more than $10 million. – Artnet
- Warner Creates $1+ Billion Fund To Buy Rights To Music Catalogs
Warner Music Group and private investment giant Bain Capital are launching a $1.2 billion joint venture to acquire “legendary” music catalogs across both recorded music and music publishing. – Music Business Worldwide
- The Benin Bronzes: Who Created Them, Who Has Had Them When, Who’s Returning Them To Whom Now And Why
The Netherlands turned over 119 objects to the Nigerian government, while the MFA Boston gave their two directly to the Oba of Benin. “As these two repatriations underscore, questions linger about who should rightfully receive them — the state or the Oba — as well as what restitution looks like in practice.” – Artnet
- Peter Phillips, 86, Britain’s Pioneer Of Pop Art
“He became one of the originators of the British Pop art movement in the 1950s and ’60s. … Phillips layered mundane images of consumer culture and mass entertainment into his vibrantly colored paintings, often with a playful twist.” – ARTnews
- What Worries “60 Minutes” Staffers About The Paramount-Trump Settlement
“(Many) believe weeks of leaks about Paramount’s legal machinations and of the 60 Minutes staff’s aversion to any kind of settlement have already undermined the show. Paramount has allowed the newsmagazine … to become ‘the opposition,’ says one of these people. ‘It’s so damaging.’” – Variety
- Milwaukee Ballet Drops Live Orchestra For Two Of Next Season’s Productions, Including “Nutcracker”
Citing “operating costs (which) continue to rise while revenue earnings have not kept pace,” company management announced that it would use recorded music for The Nutcracker and ALICE (in wonderland) but that the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra will play for season opener Giselle. – Milwaukee Magazine
- Will America’s Polarized Politics Derail Next Year’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations?
Will the occasion underline the country’s divisions, as with Trump’s military parade and the No Kings protests? Or can Americans come together over the principles in the Declaration of Independence? The Bicentennial in 1976, also a time of division after the Vietnam War and Watergate, could offer some clues. – The New York Times
- SUMMER RERUN: “The Planet Will Be Fine. It’s the People Who Will Be F**ked.” — George Carlin
From December 2024 (just after the election): the comedian’s late-career epiphany and the nonprofit arts sector begs the question: what happens when you eliminate “hope?”
Photo by Insomnia Cured Here licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 We’re rounding the turn and heading into the home stretch of 2024. Your nonprofit arts organization is well into its year-end, give now while you can still get a tax deduction, do it for the children (“Won’t someone think of the children?!”), just click on the “donate” button, Christmas is coming (Christmas, for Christ’s sake!), ticket sales only cover 50% of the cost of doing business, help us reach our goal (regardless of what your goal might be), and (that golden oldie), “if we don’t raise $20 million by December 31, we’ll go out of business” campaign.
“A gift to us is a gift to hope.” Ho. Ho. Ho.
But what if we ran our nonprofit arts operations as though hope were not a part of the equation? Not “hopeless,” as in sad, woeful, or fatalistic. “Not hope,” as in though there were no such thing. After all, there’s no mention of hope in the IRS 501(C)(3) code. Among the biblical troika, only faith and charity are mentioned. And nonprofit arts organizations, especially the largest, most “venerable” ones, seem to avoid the charity part anyway.
Let’s remove, for the moment, the commercial aspect of the sector and just concentrate on what it would take for your community to be a healthier, more equitable place to live. What if all the promises of hope engendered by the art were stripped away and left to the community’s own devices?
Among those paying attention, the most important issue facing mankind right now is climate change. But, as the title of this particular column indicates, the issue plagues mankind, not the planet. This planet will be spinning along for billions more years. So when you hear people begging you to “save the planet,” you can look at them with confidence and know that they’re really asking, “Shouldn’t we save the people on the planet?” Shouldn’t we?
Should we?
Drill down on that one: if you believe that yes, people are worth saving, is it because you personally don’t want to die? Or are all people worth saving? Taken further, would you feel anything if all the people with whom you’ll never come into contact suddenly disappeared and you never heard about their disappearance? And what if you had heard and knew that you and everyone you know would be spared, would you feel devastated? Momentarily paranoid? Briefly sad?
What if we eliminated hope from the equation?
If you choose to eliminate hope from your belief system, this is not a difficult question. That same belief system has given you a relatively arbitrary notion that things should be ideal. Hope is the “opiate of the masses,” because without hope, there is no religion.
There is some disagreement among scientists as to whether hope exists in any other living thing on earth. To me, some confuse hope with expectation, anticipation, or the pursuit of happiness and bend the question toward hope being a universal activity. However, when your dog is waiting by the door, is he/she really hopeful, or merely happy to have your company, hungry, and ready to go outside? Love is real, but is love hope?
Promoting hope as a primary goal will doom your arts organization to irrelevance. You can’t eat, sleep in, or gain equity with hope; there has to be action. The continuing, dogmatic treatment of the arts as a panacea for all the ills of the world can only fail for charitable organizations. As Ben Davis wrote in artnet recently, the story of the 2024 election, an election that relegated those on the left are to a state of torpor and grief, is not that “hope” lost. Hope was never in the game.
[P]eople are suffering a narrative shock. The story that they had in their heads to make sense of the world has collapsed. It is similar in nature to the shock after Biden melted down onstage at the debate — very alarming on its own, but absolutely traumatic because right up until that moment, many influential voices had insisted that Biden’s mental unfitness was Republican propaganda, that he was about to school Trump. Because that was a more comforting story, a better product to sell.
— Ben Davis, artnet, November 8, 2024
Now, it’s not just that Donald Trump has triumphed. It’s that the entire Biden-era attempt to disqualify him technically over his crimes and his lies and January 6 prevented a reckoning with Trump’s actual very real popularity in 2020, when he actually did get a really massive popular vote total despite losing (and lying about losing). Focusing so much emotional energy just on emphasizing that he must be too weird, too criminal, to be acceptable to “mainstream” America — and then suddenly having to face the reality that actually he’s way more mainstream than his critics themselves… this is a stunning shock. Some people will never recover.Trump, the soon-to-be-even-more-conservative Supreme Court, the right-wing House, the right-wing Senate are going to do a bunch of rotten things to people. They really don’t care. Their views on karma, heaven and hell, and moral turpitude line up with George Carlin’s late-in-life disillusionment. Among the millions of things they’ll do is to increase greenhouse gases past the point of no return (assuming we haven’t passed it already).
But does that matter to the most powerful (financially, at least) American nonprofit arts organizations? Do they aim to be a force for good in their communities, let alone the world? Some do. Most don’t. Those that do will be the ones remembered for, at least temporarily, contributing to a thriving community comprised of housed people, fed people, and dignity for all kinds of people.
Most of those behemoth nonprofit arts organizations don’t really care about anything past their own fundraising goals and artistic vision (whatever that is). Don’t worry. The planet is and will continue to be fine. It’s the people that will be f**ked.
It’s been a hell of a 2024. Catch you next year. – AH
- Paris’s Asian Art Museum Sued For “Tibet Erasure”
“Four pro-Tibetan groups in France have filed a legal complaint against Paris’s state-run Musée Guimet, accusing it of attempting to erase Tibet’s cultural identity by renaming its Nepal-Tibet gallery to ‘Himalayan world’ and removing references to ‘Tibetan art.’” – Artnet
- Average Ticket Price In London’s West End Up By Nearly One-Quarter
What’s more, the difference between the shows with the highest and lowest average ticket prices is narrower than one year ago. – The Stage
- The Last Of The Vatican’s Raphael Rooms Has Now Been Restored
“A decadelong project to clean and restore the largest of the four … spectacularly frescoed reception rooms of the Apostolic Palace … uncovered a novel mural painting technique that the superstar Renaissance painter and architect began but never completed.” – AP
- Should we subsidize arts consumers, art producers, or neither?
My friends Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan have started a new venture, Arts Analytics, where they hope to bring more extensive, and shared, use of data into arts policy thinking, and also to spur discussion.
A recent post of theirs asked what is actually an old question in the arts policy world: if we are going to subsidize the arts, is it best done through grants to arts producers, or through running the subsidy through arts consumers? They think we ought to give more consideration to the latter:
A demand-centered reframing would start by letting audiences steer a portion of public funds. Converting a slice of operating grants into cultural vouchers or match-savings accounts would shift purchasing power directly to households and reveal real preferences. Public support could be indexed to robust engagement metrics—unique visitors, hours of participation, co-creation—rather than to the sheer number of productions mounted. The tax code could extend credits to ticket purchases, streaming subscriptions, or the DIY tools that turn consumers into creators. Investments in open-licensed archives, maker spaces, and remix rights would raise the psychic return on participation, while a modernized data regime could publish an “attention GDP” alongside conventional value-added, finally giving non-market demand a seat at the policy table.
They invited readers to respond, and this week published two of those responses, from former NEA Chair Bill Ivey, and from me. It’s nice to see this sort of dialogue – I hope there is more of it.
You can read Bill’s full response at the previous link. He begins:
The [nonprofit] arts sector likes to “look at itself from the stage” because a producer dominated perspective frees policy actors to pay little or no attention to audience demand, audience choice, or audience taste. This focus conceals the reality that given the opportunity, many Americans would not buy what arts organizations are selling. Early in the most-recent incarnation of government support for the arts (The NEA Era,1965-2025), advocates disdained popular arts and mass culture, offering an alternative that justified nonprofit access to public money. In this formulation, the nonprofit fine arts were embraced as an antidote to TV, movies, rock ‘n’ roll, and so on. This public interest role justified the development and maintenance of a closed system: producers and experts who “knew what is best” for audiences would frame objectives, determine costs, and then motivate a tiny audience – government officials – to “consume” the nonprofit arts product. The pitch to funders was about secondary, instrumental benefits: an investment of a few million would make their communities happier, their youth better aligned, their nation a bit stronger. Favorable tax policy complimented grantmaking. Freed from the limits imposed by demand, this approach enabled a spectacular expansion of the nonprofit sector, one that over the decades all but guaranteed a “chronic oversupply” of many kinds of artmaking. Today, nonprofit leaders know that their foundational argument – a virtuous alternative to corrupting mass culture — isn’t the political asset it was years ago. Although no longer in the foreground, disdain for “the popular” that justified claims made to policy actors lives on in the field’s DNA. (Our nonprofit art is just better!) Unfortunately, no new “why?” has been advanced in support of the current model, and the “replace-TV- and-rock argument” has retreated to the background. It is surprising that, despite the absence of a compelling justification, a closed system in which the only “demand” is what can be sustained among a handful of elected officials and societal elites remains essential to the fiscal health of the entire nonprofit arts community. …
Here is my response. You’ll see the style is pretty informal – I originally just wrote to Joanna and Doug via email, not expecting publication. In any case…
When it comes to using public funds to support the arts, a question needs to be asked at the outset: Why? What is it about the market allocation of resources and distribution of outputs in the cultural sector that could use some improvement via public policy? This has to come first, and then we can ask: so, given the goal we want to achieve, what is the best means of getting there?
Normally, we look to subsidies when we think there is under-consumption and production. But is that what we have? Recorded arts – video, music, images, text – are widely available at extremely low prices to the consumer. As you note, we already have tons of consumer surplus. This is in itself a result of a market failure – in an internet world with digital recordings, it is really hard to guard one’s intellectual property, and so any provider of product is sharply constrained in what they can charge without consumers turning to other options. So, in that sphere there is loads of access, and any state subsidy would be superfluous – would we really need to subsidize Spotify subscriptions?
So, what about “live” arts – performances, and visual art on canvas or in marble? Again, we would need to ask what problem we are trying to solve. You are correct that if we thought there was less-than optimal consumption, we could subsidize, and we could subsidize either through grants to nonprofits (as we typically now do in North America) or through consumer vouchers (as with, for example, the youth cultural vouchers that were tried in some European countries recently). Now, while in teaching undergrad public finance we show students that when it comes to subsidies (or excise taxes) on a good, in terms of outcome and incidence it doesn’t matter which we choose regarding who “officially” gets the subsidy (if we want to put a ten cent subsidy per pint of blueberries, it doesn’t matter whether it is given to consumers or producers – prices will adjust the same way), in the arts it is a different sort of thing, because the subsidy isn’t per pint of arts. Consumer vouchers are more like an ordinary subsidy – they apply to purchases – but producer subsidies are not – they apply to the grant-writing prowess of the organization, in which audience numbers play some role but are not the whole story.
I think what you are trying to say here is that there ought to be a subsidy of some sorts, and that basing it on consumer choices is better than a system of grants that is only tangentially related to audience numbers. Okay. But it leaves the question of why we are doing this. When French kids with culture vouchers mostly ended up at the manga store, the government was forced to ask, “is this what we were trying to do?” What sorts of things would the voucher apply to, and what would be left out? Respecting consumer choice doesn’t get the state out of having to answer that question. And once it gets into the job of figuring out where to draw the boundaries, well, that has to be “top down”. It requires a statement that these things warrant a subsidy that other things do not. If I can shamelessly self-promote, that is one of the arguments in the final chapter of my book – arts policy means choosing what is going to count as art worthy of subsidy, and what is not. You can’t get around it.Note I wrote about the French Culture Pass on this blog here and here…
- How Sondheim’s Collection Came To The Library Of Congress
The Library announced this week that it has acquired more than 5,000 items from Sondheim’s collection, which will be available to the public on July 1. – CBC
- In Wartime Ukraine, Shakespeare Is Booming
“A King Lear and two Othellos are in repertoire in major Kyiv theatres; there is also A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the capital, a Hamlet, a Macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet.” And there’s the Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, which Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins went to visit. – The Guardian
- Cultural Vandalism: Alberta’s Book-Banning Project
“This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.) – The Walrus
- Canada Debates What Qualifies As Canadian Culture
The outcome will shape who gets to tell Canadian stories and what those stories are, and also which ones count as Canadian under the law. This, in turn, will determine who in the film and television industries can access funding, tax credits and visibility on streaming services. – The Conversation
- New Project Reveals 700 Years Of Irish History
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, a global academic collaboration led by Trinity College Dublin, deployed historians, computer scientists and other specialists to digitally recreate parts of a vast archive destroyed in Ireland’s civil war. – The Guardian
- Why Alicia Graf Mack Left Juilliard To Run The Ailey Company
“I’ve always been aligned with the mission and values of Ailey. So when I heard they were searching for a new artistic director, given all the knowledge and experience I’ve gained, it almost felt like I would be doing myself and the organization a disservice not to try.” – Dance Magazine
- Hollywood Takes On AI Copyright Rules In Washington
America’s creators are mounting a campaign to push back on any use of their work without permission or compensation, seeking to head off potential abuses of their intellectual property. – The Wall Street Journal
- Director of São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil Out After Less Than Two Years
Hélio Menezes is no longer the director of the Museu Afro Brasil, a key São Paulo institution founded by sculptor Emanoel Araújo that is known for its support of Afro-Brazilian artists, who have long been neglected by mainstream institutions in the country. – ARTnews
- Warner Music Announces Layoffs, Cuts
In the memo, reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, Kyncl wrote that WMG is looking to reduce costs by about $300 million to “future-proof” the company and “reinvest in the business,” particularly into the music itself. – The Hollywood Reporter
- “Performative Reading” And The Cynical Young’uns Making Fun Of It
“It’s called performative reading not just because someone might be pretending to read, but rather that they want everyone to know they read. The presumption is that they’re performing for passersby, signaling they have the taste and attention span to pick up a physical book instead of putting in AirPods.” – The Guardian