AJBlogs

A couple of my recent blogs – here and here — have saluted John Luther Adams as “among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra. . . . Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the

In the evolving world of AI, marketing is moving from getting messages out to engaging in dialog with the consumer. Messages get lost in the Sea of Messages. Persuasion asks what you're interested in first and engages you in opportunities.

I cannot think of a better conversationalist about music, and about the state of things musical today, than the conductor Kenneth Woods. Ken is an American based in the UK, where he conducts the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester and resides in Wales. He programs bravely and insightfully. He presides

It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don’t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar’s “Show of Shows” went off the air in 1954 and I

Now that it’s 2026, the public expects its charities to be charitable — including your theater, opera, ballet, museum, and symphony.

A reader, Kevin, asks if I had seen this new report by Brian Shearer at Vanderbilt University on legal remedies for high prices charged by different sorts of firms (airports, hospitals, car dealerships, etc) on “captive” consumers. I had not. I am no lawyer, and so I cannot speak to the various

If 2025 is the year that 20th Century culture models stopped working, 2026 is the year we turn to building something new.

Adrian Rodriguez, Director of Community Engagement, Chorus Director and Curriculum Manager of the Music Advancement Program at The Juilliard School, shares how to implement a commitment to young people as they develop in the arts.

We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the "death of cinema"—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a

If you're serious about succeeding as a nonprofit arts organization, you're going to want to pick up the trilogy at your favorite bookstore.

Nostalgia may be having a moment, but to say that's all that audiences want is oversimplifying. A recent NY Times article flattens the current moment in regional theater and I analyze what it means for how we can understand audiences.

Cheyenne King-Bails, Director of Community Experience at The Sphinx Organization, shares the value of the SphinxConnect conference and its impact on the arts community.

Dear Mayor Mamdani, We love your love of arts for all, and we swooned when we read that your favorite museum is the art we all see and share together in the NYC subway: the “…beautiful murals and pieces of art across our subway system. And the fulfillment of art as being something for the

Literary critic and academic John Carey died last week at the age of ninety-one. I always enjoyed reading his reviews. If you hadn’t already guessed how the Bloomsbury set and their literary contemporaries viewed common folk, his book The Intellectuals and the Masses gives you chapter and verse. I enjoyed Henry Oliver’s appreciation of

Everyone's talking about AI, and you're being pestered to use it every time you open your phone. But are you aware the extent that AI has taken over how much of what you see and hear online?