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The Party of Can’t And Won’t (So Let’s Change The Conversation)

canceled

Mitt Romney said last week he'll kick funding for the arts and public broadcasting to the curb if he gets to be president. "We're not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird is going to have advertisements," Romney said, while speaking at Homer's Deli in Clinton, Iowa. Like virtually every other conservative candidate, Romney has had it -- had it! -- with government expenditures like public broadcasting, and he wants to save taxpayers money by cutting federal funding to programs like PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts. There are many … [Read more...]

The Excellence Problem

vcrincabinet

If I built the best-ever VCR, would you rush out to buy it? Of course not. Even though my VCR might be the most excellent VCR, no one cares about VCRs anymore. Being excellent at something no one cares about doesn't get you very far. What was excellent yesterday doesn't necessarily matter today. If I'm all about apples and you bring me oranges, I don't care how good the oranges are. So when orchestras or theatre companies say they are "excellent" what do they mean? Playing all the right notes? Performing in tune? The actors remember all … [Read more...]

Are you a Channel or are you a Library?

library

TV used to be an appointment medium. It's Thursday night at 8 and you're in front of the set watching or else you missed your favorite show. Then VCR's, DVD's and DVR's progressively pecked away at the appointment schedule. Many of us now wait till a show has aired and then watch a saved copy at our leisure. On-demand TV and mobile subscriptions from channels like HBO and services like Hulu further erode the appointment habit. So now TV is a hybrid business, sliding towards a publishing model in which the product is released and viewers … [Read more...]

Do you want to be my cable company or my TV provider?

tv

I pay my cable provider to supply me with TV. Since I don't want to watch on my cable provider's schedule I pay for Tivo. Since my cable provider doesn't have all the movies I want to watch, I buy DVDs. I also have a Netflix subscription. Since I travel a lot I use Hulu. My cable provider isn't cheap. My cable provider thinks the value it delivers is access to its pipe. But I don't care about the pipe, I care about being able to see what I want to see. When I want to see it. And where I want to see it - on my TV, on my phone, on my … [Read more...]

Sharing, The New Default

share

Build something in the physical world and the minute it's used it starts to decay - scuffs, dents, chips. Drive a car off the new car lot and it immediately loses ten percent of its value. Use something a lot and eventually it wears out. Art is different. A work of art gets more powerful when more people use it. Music that gives voice to people grows in meaning. A play that doesn't get discussed stops getting produced. If at least some of the power of art comes from the ways people choose to use it, to interact with it, to change and … [Read more...]

The New Literate?

qr

Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material. - Wikipedia Literacy at its most basic is the ability to read and write. Someone is judged "literate" by what they've read or written, and notions of literateness (as opposed to "literacy") have changed over time. Time was when definitions of literate included study of Latin. Then there was a list of Great Books you had to have read. Today our access to information and knowledge is so vast and … [Read more...]

The Classical Music Critic Goes Extinct

John Terauds, Music Critic

Seems important to note the passing of music criticism as a legitimate job in Canada. John Terauds, for six years staff classical music critic of the Toronto Star, was reassigned this week to the paper’s business section. He was the last full-time classical music critic at a Canadian newspaper. The job of full-time classical music critic literally ceases to exist in English-speaking Canada (Quebec apparently still has a couple of critics). This is depressing. Apart from being a fan of John’s work, the loss of his job is symbolic of … [Read more...]

A New Look

via CommonCraft

If you're a follower of ArtsJournal blogs, you'll notice that this blog doesn't look the same as any of the others. That's because I'm in the midst of redesigning all of AJ, starting with the blogs, and using my own as a beta test. It's not just the look that's different (and that look will continue to evolve over the next few weeks, as I work on it). I'm rebuilding the backend of AJ as well. We're moving from the Movable Type blogging platform to WordPress. When we moved to MT several years ago, it offered better features. But in the past … [Read more...]

Sorry, but I’ll take experience over artistry

Meadowlands website

Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. They sell the contest. They sell the experience. And they have to work to keep making the experience better. How many perfectly functional stadiums were discarded in the 1990s/00's to be replaced by facilities with better amenities? And there's barely a moment during a game when there isn't something going on to entertain fans whether there's a play on the … [Read more...]

The Lang Lang Experience, Live And In 3D

Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang Lang's concert in London over the weekend:He is not the first classical pianist to give a solo Albert Hall recital but few of his predecessors brought along in-your-face amplification and multiple screens relaying close-ups of his hands at work. The sonic perspective rendered his Steinway clangorous and the only way to make the sound seem "natural" was to … [Read more...]

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