1. Is Funding Really The Top Issue In The Arts?
- Doug Borwick says no. “Insufficiency of funds will never go away. It’s a state of being in the nonprofit sector. Overfocus on this as an issue can get in the way of addressing the causes that might be contributing to it.”
- Michael Lind writes that taxpayer shouldn’t be funding the arts. “Why should writers get $25,000 for ‘travel, and general career advancement’ but not janitors, or home health aides, or car mechanics?”
- The National Endowment for the Arts attempts to measure what the arts contribute to the American economy, releasing its new report looking at creative industries. Judith Dobrzynski writes that the report’s data could be better organized to make it more useful.
- Arts funding doesn’t reflect the diversity of our population. “The emerging artists, audiences, and arts leaders of tomorrow do not reflect the majority of individuals who fund and lead the arts today.”
- Finally, Americans for the Arts’ Robert Lynch looks at five macro-economic trends that will shape how the arts economy works in 2016.
2. How Are Audiences Getting Their Arts?
- When the Danish Chamber Orchestra got itself into a funding crisis it threw a Hail Mary and launched a Kickstarter campaign. Guess what? Improbably, it worked…
- The celebrity gossip website TMZ turned itself into a media powerhouse by crowdsourcing. “TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons.”
- City light festivals are lighting up the globe. “Many of these free light festivals include interactive displays that turn spectators into participants who can change colors or patterns by moving or playing a game.”
3. What is the Role of Art/Artists in our Culture?
- The city of Boston is trying to figure out a bigger role for artists in city planning. “Today’s artists in residence may not paint the ceiling of City Hall, but they will surely contribute to Boston’s renaissance.”
- Why aren’t Canadians supporting Canadian culture? The Canadian government spend a lot on supporting Canadian artists, but consumers are increasingly choosing to pay attention to culture from elsewhere.
- Increasingly, our music is chosen for us by algorithms. “I am aware of being profiled by forces I do not know and cannot see. I am being given an ongoing accessory for someone of my type. Often I hate the results, even if I like half the songs: I feel intensely frustrated by what it has reduced me to.”
- This guy gave up listening for a year to all the music he knows. Something interesting happened…
- Our cities change. Buildings change. So what should be preserved? What’s artistically worth saving? New York City has a confusing way of deciding.
4. This Week in Copyright
- How The DMCA Copyright Law Is Making It Illegal For Documentary Filmmakers To Do Their Work “Filmmakers and authors have long held the right to make fair use of copyrighted material, transforming it for uses like criticism and commentary, making arguments, and providing historical context. But the DMCA made it illegal—and, in some cases, a crime—to access this content by breaking encryption.”
- Why Are Academic Publishers Making Billions Off The Unpaid Labor Of Professors And Researchers? “I get paid nothing directly for the most difficult, time-consuming writing I do: peer-reviewed academic articles. In fact a journal that owned the copyright to one of my articles made me pay $400 for permission to reprint my own writing in a book of my essays.”
5. Is Opera Our Most-Vital “New” Art Form?
- An Opera Revolution: The Numbers Are In And Opera Has Changed “It’s startling to see how quickly the opera world has changed, which composers (according to Operabase) are most popular and which no longer are. Of the 100 in this new concise book, more than 50% have flourished since 1900 and 18 of them – almost 20% – are living.”
- What’s Happened To Italian Opera Singers? They’ve Gone MIA The fierce new competition seems to have caught Italians by surprise. “There are good voices in Italy but many of them think a good voice is enough and don’t want to learn the other aspects such as acting.”
Just for Fun/Think
- Strategy: Storied Publisher’s Success In Staying Small
- As Bad As The News Is These Days, Our World Is Better Than It Was Even A Century Ago, Let Alone A Millennium
- Is This Why Americans Don’t Trust Experts? (An Experiment)
- Is The Metropolitan Museum’s New Logo A Train Wreck?
- This Guy Is Trying To Review The World’s Literature. All Of It.
Of the 19 articles you list, 8 are about funding, the first 5, plus the Danish Chamber orchestra Kickstarter campaign, Canadian government spending vs. foreign art, and paying academic authors for their books.
Some weeks it just goes like that.