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- Culture’s Business Models, Both on Trial
Good Morning,
The French are fighting for their cultural model in the street: an estimated 1,800 people protested arts funding cuts in front of Avignon’s Papal Palace, turning the festival into a month-long argument over what the state owes its artists (The New York Times). America had that argument 35 years ago, and The New Yorker revisits how it got ignited — an NEA chairman who believed in artistic freedom, flip-flopping between his principles and his politics. The most durable American answer turns out to be local: Cleveland just ranked first among ten U.S. cities for arts-organization revenue growth, on the strength of Cuyahoga County’s public funding (Ideastream).
The market model is hitting its ceiling at the same time. Artnet asks whether the mega-gallery era was the art world’s march on Moscow, and the auction houses’ half-year reports read less like art sales than financial-services prospectuses — a significant shift in the business model (ARTnews). The counterintuitive retail lesson comes from Costco, thriving as the anti-Amazon by selling less choice, not more (The Walrus).
And the World Cup staged its first-ever halftime show. “Well, that happened” is a review (The New York Times).
All of our stories below.
- Judge Pauses Paramount/Warner Deal
“This is a critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day,” California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, a Democrat who is leading the states’ lawsuit, said in a statement. A spokeswoman for Paramount did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – The New York Times
- Large Protests In France Over Arts Funding Cuts
In Avignon, where artists, programmers and theatergoers rub shoulders for a month every summer, the announcement has ignited fierce debates and protests. Last week, an estimated 1,800 people demonstrated in front of the Papal Palace. – The New York Times
- Auction House Sales Reports Show A Fundamental Change In The Art Business
This year, the houses devoted nearly as much space to private sales, lending, financial services, luxury goods, hospitality, and advisory work as they did to paintings and sculptures. Read together, they suggest that the biggest transformation in the auction business isn’t the recovery itself. It’s the transformation of the auction houses’ businesses. – ARTnews
- A Bill In Congress To Protect Art Owned by The Federal Government
The PRESERVE Act (“Protecting Resources and Ensuring Stewardship of Enduring Records of Visual Expression Act”) would require the General Services Administration, which manages federal agencies, to identify any artworks contained within government buildings deemed “surplus property” and form a committee to oversee the future of said artworks. – ARTnews
- A Lifetime With My Teacher
Her name was Lore Segal, but often, when I spoke of her to friends or to my own students, I referred to her as “my teacher,” though nearly 50 years had passed since I’d sat in a classroom with her. – The American Scholar
- Why Costco Is Thriving As The Antithesis Of Amazon
While most retailers today assume that consumers want ever greater assortment, Costco’s popularity speaks to a countervailing desire for less choice. Indeed, the pre-selection of items for sale in their warehouses is part of the value proposition. – The Walrus
- Field Notes from a Soft-Hearted Theater Snob
If I had been watching the movie at home, I definitely would not have teared up. But sitting in a theater with about 3,000 other people, watching the Beast turn around and see Belle at the top of the stairs near the end of Beauty and the Beast, I couldn’t help it: I was verklempt.
That was not the only surprise of my theater season that wrapped up yesterday when I saw the national tour of The Notebook. My theater menu this year included a subscription to the Broadway series at Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), where I saw five Broadway musicals and two plays (well, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was more like a theme park show to be honest) on their national tours. Musical theater isn’t my favorite genre, but I respect it greatly and want to deepen my appreciation of the form, so subscribing to DPAC is part of my personal cultural curriculum.
My preferred theater taste would be more downtown/experimental (at least that’s what the Boomers and X-ers call it; “indie theater” if you’re Gen Z). In that genre, I saw Lost Lear, a production by Irish director Dan Colley and The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, created by Joshua William Gelb, brought to North Carolina by university presenters, Carolina Performing Arts and NC State Live.
I expected to spend the season thinking about acting, directing, design, and production and relishing the craft and ingenuity of top professional artists. But as always, I found myself watching the audiences just as much as the shows. These are my field notes from one season spent sitting among very different theater audiences.
Theater asks audiences to participate in different ways
Broadway musicals are infectious creatures for big emotion, and even this theater pro is not immune. I welled up with tears at the end of The Outsiders and The Notebook, along with just about everyone else in the house. The songs, performances, design, pacing, and scale in Broadway musicals are all working to generate a shared emotional response.
When working well, the effect is hard to resist. (Hell’s Kitchen didn’t work on me – I was taken out of it as my inner dramaturg awoke and I spent the show mentally fixing the holes in the back story.) There is something powerful about thousands of audience members laughing, cheering, gasping, and crying together at the same time. No wonder musicals are the most popular genre in the U.S.
Lost Lear asked something very different of its audience. The piece was subtle, poignant, and beautifully crafted, using the story of King Lear to explore dementia and the bittersweet experience of familial love. The audience was sparse in a large theater, and at times it felt as though I could have been alone with the performance. Rather than sweeping the audience along, the production asked us to concentrate, sit with uncertainty, and lean into its rhythms and allow it to take us along switches between styles of naturalism, puppetry and video.
Two college students sitting next to me squirmed throughout the first act and left at intermission. I don’t say that to criticize them or the production. Their reaction was part of what made the contrast so striking. Lost Lear and The Notebook both dealt with dementia, memory, love, and loss, but they approached those subjects through completely different artistic languages. The Notebook wore its emotions openly and delivered them at scale. Lost Lear was quieter, stranger, and more demanding. Both were moving, but they required different kinds of attention from the audience.
More than a show to the audience
I eavesdrop all the time when I go to the theater. (How could I call myself an audience researcher if I didn’t?) What I hear most often is not commentary about the acting or the design. It is people catching up and sharing the mundane and exceptional parts of their lives with the people they came with. “Oh, let me tell you about…” may have been the phrase I heard most often all season.
On Sunday at The Notebook, I saw people passing phones back and forth to share wedding pictures and photos of a new house. A gentleman sitting next to me at Stereophonic gave his friend a detailed play-by-play of his open-heart surgery (TMI!).
All this reinforces that the show is not really why most audience members are there. The performance creates an occasion for people to spend meaningful time with friends and family. The show is part of a larger evening shaped by relationships, memories, and conversation.
In addition to eavesdropping, I just chat people up that sit next to me. At The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, I sat next to a couple who had no idea what they were going to watch. Egon Tichy is a one-man show based on a science fiction story. The actor is in a closet-sized box, with a double of him on a video screen. It’s an incredibly well-crafted show by Joshua William Gelb who has been honing this style since he created Theater in Quarantine during COVID.
But the couple had no idea about all that background. They told me they had been meaning to get out to the theater again after not having gone for a while, so they simply bought tickets to what was playing and were game for seeing something interesting. They were not experts on the piece, and they were not relying on a familiar title. They just wanted to return to the theater and were willing to take a chance.
Arts organizations spend a great deal of time worrying that audiences will not try unfamiliar work. Sometimes that concern is justified, but this couple represented another kind of audience member: someone motivated less by the title than by the desire to have a theater experience. Their willingness to buy a ticket unseen just filled me with happiness. I was so excited for them – I knew that it was going to be a fun evening, and definitely something they wouldn’t get anywhere else around here. It was rare, it was a treat. They trusted that going to the theater would be worthwhile even when they did not know exactly what they were going to see.
There are plenty of people looking for something fun to do, and would be open to theater or performing arts or a museum – we just need to break through in their awareness, give them enough of a preview that they’ll take a bit of a risk, and then give them a great experience.
There cannot be a wrong way to begin loving theater
Theater organizations talk constantly about making audiences feel welcome. Welcome is about more than ticket prices, dress codes, parking, or friendly ushers. It also means allowing people to have the experience they actually came to have without signaling that they are appreciating the art incorrectly.
Those of us who work in the arts can be remarkably snobbish about what counts as a legitimate response. I’ve had to unlearn this snobbishness myself. We tend to admire the audience member who approaches a performance with concentration, analytical distance, and an appreciation for subtle artistic choices. We are less generous toward the person who wants spectacle, a familiar story, a good cry, or an enjoyable evening with friends and family. One response gets treated as serious engagement. The other gets dismissed as mere entertainment.
But entertainment is not the opposite of engagement, and emotional immediacy is not the opposite of artistic value. The Notebook and Lost Lear both explored dementia, memory, love, and loss. They did so through radically different artistic languages, and they asked different things of their audiences. One created emotion openly and at scale. The other worked through subtlety, ambiguity, and sustained attention. I was moved by both.
If we want audiences to grow again, we need to celebrate that range of experience rather than arranging it into a hierarchy. People do not generally enter an art form through its most unfamiliar or intellectually demanding work. They begin with something that captures them. They enjoy themselves. They feel moved. They learn how to be in the room. They have fun. They return to something familiar. Over time, they may become curious about what else the form can do.
The couple sitting beside me at The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy offered another version of that story. They were willing to encounter unfamiliar work because the idea of going to the theater already felt inviting enough, interesting enough, and safe enough to trust.
That is what audience development should ultimately build: not a march from supposedly inferior art toward supposedly superior art, but a growing confidence that the theater contains many kinds of experiences and that you are entitled to explore them. You can cry at a musical, puzzle over a contemporary performance, bring your children in costume, catch up with a friend at intermission, or decide that a particular show is not for you. None of those experiences disqualifies you from belonging.
If theater is going to become a place where more people develop lasting curiosity and affection for the form, we have to make room for the full range of reasons they walk through the door. We cannot invite people in and then quietly judge them for loving the wrong thing, feeling too much, knowing too little, or having too much fun.
The audience does not need to prove that it deserves the theater. The theater needs to give people enough ways to discover that it belongs to them too.
- What Touched Off The Culture Wars
Frohnmayer’s dilemma was that he believed in artistic freedom and didn’t think Congress should dictate what the N.E.A. funded, but he also felt obliged, as a political appointee, to avoid funding work that Congress and the President found offensive. The result was flip-flopping. – The New Yorker
- When Is It Okay To Let A Language Die?
Preserve this language (or species or building or mine) or else surrender to indifference, cynicism, and nihilism. But is that ever the choice we face? – The New Yorker
- A Short History Of Being Burned Out
Burnout’s meaning shifted from literal to figurative over time. It began as a description of candles burning out or fuel being used up, then shifted to a barn burning down and a worker’s energy or body being depleted in the rebuilding. Eventually it came to simply describe a worker’s exhaustion. – The Conversation
- Why Is Everything Weird? Blame The Uni-Context
How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? – Derek Thompson
- Cleveland Comes Out On Top For Public Funding Of The Arts
The report ranked Cleveland No. 1 revenue growth among arts organizations from 2019 to 2024 in a cohort of 10 U.S. cities. The others were Atlanta, Des Moines, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento and Seattle. – Ideastream
- Hollywood Press Tours Have Turned Into Gimmicky Side Shows
“Why do so many press-tour stops these days suddenly feel like the halfway point between TikTok and a cult’s humiliation ritual?” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Publishers Fight For Sweet, Sweet ‘Odyssey’ Money
New covers – foil-stamped! Or colorfully graphic-novel-esque! – famous translators, deckled edges, and marketing moves try to set apart various versions of The Odyssey for the surprisingly robust market. – The New York Times
- How Going To The Beach Turned Into A Country Music Trope
“Country music tends to be preoccupied with place; the charts are full of tributes to the satisfaction of being firmly rooted in a small town, and the sorrows of leaving it behind. In fact, this preoccupation is the secret theme of these sun-and-sand songs.” – The New Yorker
- The Man Who Killed Dancer O’Shae Sibley Is Finally Sentenced
“He became a devoted student at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s drop-in classes. Sibley integrated his love of movement with his identity as a proud Black gay man, and in his advocacy for social change and racial justice through public performances.” – Hyperallergic
- How Indigenous Communities In Brazil Are Dealing With Threats From The Internet
Using Nhandeflix, “users can find Guarani cultural productions like Roda Cutia (a Guarani children’s song), Bicicletas de Nhanderú (a documentary about a Guarani-Mbya town in southern Brazil), … and Como a noite apareceu (a fictional film based on a Guarani legend).” – El País English
- The End Of The Mega Gallery
“Are we witnessing the art world’s Napoleonic march to Moscow, an over-expansion propelled by hubris that is now inevitably falling to its knees?” – Artnet
- Rating The First Ever World Cup Halftime Show
Well, that happened. “Purists saw it as another concession to American spectacle.” – The New York Times
- Renoir Sure Painted A Lot Of Young Girls
Who were they? – LitHub
- Emmy Voters Seem To Be Afraid Of ‘The Boys,’ And That’s A Shame
“The superhero spoof … received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together.” – The New York Times
- In The UK, Fifty Years Of Post-Punk, Radical Fanzines See A Massive Resurgence
Why? “Digital attention span is at an all-time low. … You’re almost definitely going to spend more time looking at a zine than anything you see scrolling. It’s more interesting and more real.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Women Bringing Whoopi Goldberg’s Legacy Back To Broadway
“The theatrical return not only highlights Goldberg’s enduring comedic chops but also showcases her versatility as a playwright with a deep empathy for everyday people often lost to stereotype.” – The New York Times
- The Irish Times Catches Up On BookTok And Bookstagram
“Contemporary readers remain as eccentric as ever. Some buy two copies of each book: one to read messily and another to display smartly on the shelf. … And many, many of them annotate. Furiously. Dedicatedly. Fanatically.” – Irish Times
- Inside The Beloved Art Deco Library Of Los Angeles
A”fter outgrowing several smaller downtown locations, the municipal dream of a monumental downtown library was financed through a $2.5m municipal bond measure approved in 1921” – and now it houses 89 miles of books. – The Guardian (UK)
- There’s A Big Plot Twist At The End Of The Odyssey
Don’t blame Homer for this one, and don’t read this story if you don’t want spoilers. – Slate
- Resurrecting The Nearly Lost Art Of Film Projection
“In advance of The Odyssey’s release, Imax contracted 130 experienced projectionists and required each to attend an intensive, weeklong training program.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- Things You Can Hold
Good Morning,
Nostalgia is big. Physical game discs are all but gone, with preservationists bracing for what that means (The Verge). Meanwhile twentysomethings are hunting down grainy, flash-blown digital cameras from 2003 (NPR), and the mail-order catalog is staging a comeback aimed at shoppers who want to browse deliberately instead of reflexively (Salon). This isn’t just retro fetish, though. Turns out we may actually want to invest is getting to the things we want.
The platforms keep making the opposite bet. Spotify now auto-plays music videos at users who mostly want to hear albums (Wired), and Netflix stock is down 49% in a year (Los Angeles Times). Infinite frictionless content, it turns out, can get old.
The day’s hardest news comes from Nebraska, where the state is clawing back a third of a cultural endowment built on philanthropic gifts matched dollar-for-dollar with public money (NPR). The match was the innovation. It’s also the vulnerability: what a state gives, a state can take back.
And the Hollywood Bowl has a new sound system so good audiences can’t quite believe they’re outdoors (Los Angeles Times). Nobody misses the old version.
All of our stories below.
- Will Videogamers Lose All Access To Physical Games?
Looks like that future is not just coming but nearly here. “Game stores and preservationists also have to adjust to the fact that physical games are going to be harder to come by.” – The Verge
- Spotify’s Weird New User Experience Design Flaw
“There are a number of panels in the app, and the layout is confusing. The service constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums.” And now? Auto-playing music videos. – Wired
- A Little Too Ironic That The Awards For Best TV Are Quite Hard To Find On TV
“The new leaned-down Emmys will only broadcast 19 categories, compared to last year’s 26.” And the word Primetime has been, well, removed. – Vulture
- Ghana’s Handpainted, Sensationalist, Often Inaccurate Film Posters Have Become Collectible Art
“Heavy J was creating a poster … for the animated fairytale The Little Mermaid. The man with the knife wasn’t a killer but the film’s kind-hearted prince, Eric. The skull was also unrelated to the story. ‘We add more to make people interested,’ said Heavy J.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Turning A Podcast Into A Graphic Novel Isn’t Cheap
But a $2 million Kickstarter probably helped a little. – CBR
- As New Yorkers Brace For Flooding, The New New Museum Has Sprung A Pretty Big Leak
Yikes: “Video footage … shows water pooling on the gallery floor as staff members move quickly to place buckets beneath active leaks, as well as water streaming down the didactic for ‘New Humans: Memories of the Future.’” – ARTnews