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Archives for August 2016

TV Dying, Video Streaming Surging – So This Is How People Are Getting Their News (Uh-Oh)

August 30, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

A flood of stories this week show how TV is dying and video is on the rise. You think changing audience behavior is tough on arts organizations? Try it when you're a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like NBCUniversal Comcast or Verizon. Olympics TV ratings were down 18% from 2012. NBC had paid $1.23 billion for rights to the broadcast MTV Video Awards ratings this week fell 30 percent … [Read more...]

In The Church Of Big Data, Artistic Judgment Is Just A Data Point

August 29, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

A piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times this weekend delves into our fascination with Big Data. The tech industry has made so many billions of dollars being able to track, quantify and insert itself into our behavior  that many have signed on as adherents to the Church of Big Data. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised … [Read more...]

What Happens When Critical Opinion Separates From The Audience?

August 28, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

Three stories this week get to the heart of the question. First, the BBC polled critics worldwide and asked them what were the best 100 movies made so far in the 21st Century. Look at the list and you see something striking - the top 10 films collectively took in $213 million, or, as Barry Hertz observed in The Globe & Mail, about $50 million less than Suicide Squad made in two and a half … [Read more...]

This Week’s AJ Highlights: That Time Ballet Superstars Nureyev And Fonteyn Got Arrested In A “Hippie Raid”

August 28, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 1 Comment

This Week: Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns... Has the audience deserted blockbuster movies?... The best new beautiful library of 2016... Is it a good idea to pay young people to try culture?... When superstar dancers were arrested in a 1960s police raid. Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns: Historians fear that valuable Italian art and heritage have been destroyed by the … [Read more...]

Is Naked Trump Bad Satire? (And Do We Care?)

August 24, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 5 Comments

In this week's AJ highlights I included some of the stories we found about the naked Donald Trump statues that appeared in five American cities last week. One reader was unhappy: Vile & disgusting. This is not art nor it is political commentary. This is the second time in as many weeks Arts Journal has trashed Trump. I come here for news about classical arts and I am faced with this rubbish. … [Read more...]

Why Aren’t We Driving Self-Driving Cars Yet? It’s All About The Culture

August 23, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 1 Comment

Driverless cars are here and they work and by all accounts they make driving safer than when humans are piloting. So why aren't they already in showrooms? Not so fast. It's not just about whether they can be made and work and are safe. It's about a cultural shift that will have to take place before they are successfully sold. Like anything that's a significant part of our lives, there's a … [Read more...]

How Dance Will Help Teach Us About The Next Transformative Technology

August 22, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Dance is the most physical art. Bodies moving, yes, but physical also because of how bodies relate to the spaces they're in. Much of the energy in tech innovation right now is directed to exploring the edges between physical and virtual worlds, and how we perceive spaces and interact with them. Much of the work is in new interfaces for our machines - voice control, facial recognition, biometrics, … [Read more...]

Who’s Telling Your Story? (Storytellers Are Leaders)

August 21, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 11 Comments

Last week the Brooklyn artist space National Sawdust announced it had hired away Steve Smith from the Boston Globe to start an ambitious new culture journal. Smith is a former NYTimeser, a serious journalist, and an ambitious hire. So why? According to Smith: Our new journal initiative is not meant to be an alarmed response to that changing status quo, but rather to foster awareness of the … [Read more...]

This Week In Culture – Some ArtsJournal Highlights

August 21, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

This Week: An artist collective skewers Trump... How Florence's Uffizi is dramatically addressing its problems... Our fetishizing of "authenticity" doesn't ring true... So what if Google is changing the way you think... An inspiring comeback after medical calamity by one of America's best musicians. The Naked Trump: Five American cities woke up this week to statues of a naked Donald Trump … [Read more...]

When All The Culture Around Us Starts To Look The Same

August 15, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

One of the biggest comforts of fast food is its familiarity. Generic from location to location, you know not only what the food will be and how it will taste, but that the ritual of the experience will be familiar too. It isn't that fast food people are necessarily unadventurous; but at least some of the time, they're drawn to the familiar. There's a parallel on the internet. Remember the sense … [Read more...]

Culture Trends: Five Stories From The Week’s ArtsJournal That You Shouldn’t Miss

August 14, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

This Week: Is the music industry's piracy war really about higher royalty payments?... There are signs the Golden Age of TV might be ending... Theatre's emotional toll on actors... LA as the next great center of contemporary music... Europe's tourist glut is damaging its great cities. Piracy Or Pay? The Music Industry's Latest War: The music industry is complaining that rampant piracy is … [Read more...]

How Do You Test For The Arts?

August 11, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 9 Comments

It's a more difficult question than you might think. There's a maxim in the education world that only subjects that are tested are funded. Thus an imperative for arts education champions to get the arts included in required standardized tests. In a STEM world, the arts don't exist. But how do you make standardized tests for the arts? Multiple choice questions might measure knowledge but do … [Read more...]

Five Essential Stories From Last Week’s ArtsJournal Haul, Context Edition

August 7, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

This Week: The ways in which we experience art are about to change in big ways... Auction houses are becoming shadow banks for the super-wealthy with money to stash... The Met Museum's super-successful year (at least at the admissions booth)... Predictably, Harry Potter slays sales records... Do we have a problem with the ways we develop artists' careers? How We Encounter And Experience Art … [Read more...]

When We Allow Technology To Police Our Culture…

August 5, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festival and we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to a few hundred, and streaming the concerts greatly increases the number of people who can hear/see the concerts. Typically, in the 48 hours after the stream, the audience about doubles the number who saw it … [Read more...]

Trump, The Tenor, And Fascism

August 4, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 5 Comments

Over on Slate this week Brian Wise posted a piece about Donald Trump and his playing of Puccini's Nussun Dorma at campaign events. Trump had been using a recording of Pavarotti singing the aria and the singer's family had contacted him to ask him to stop. Musicians have been complaining for years about politicians using their music at events without permission, and it's always fun to ridicule a … [Read more...]

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Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

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  • Douglas McLennan on Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance: “True – but the Swiftie phenomenon demonstrates how deeply people want to engage and that they’re willing to pay dearly…” Jul 24, 21:25
  • Tom Corddry on Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance: “An additional data point: Taylor Swift drew 144,000+ to her two Seattle concerts, at an average ticket price of $123.…” Jul 24, 15:34
  • Steven Lavine on Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance: “Terrific account. Like so many of our social media Augmented crises, it’s hard to see a way forward.” Jul 24, 13:52
  • Howard Mandel on Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance: “At least it’s clear the “ long-tail” argument was a canard.” Jul 24, 06:10
  • Sam Hodak on Too Many Artists Or Not Enough Value?: “So what you’re telling me is… make a VR experience” May 12, 00:03
  • Mark on What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?: “Thank you” Mar 19, 13:15
  • Douglas McLennan on Still Amusing Ourselves to Death: Information as Cautionary Tale: “Hi John: Yes – remember over the last decade how Big Data was going to change everything and drive every…” Nov 26, 07:46
  • John McCann on Still Amusing Ourselves to Death: Information as Cautionary Tale: “I haven’t read this book, yet your review triggered an insight about information shared within organizations and how so much…” Nov 26, 03:57
  • Richard Voorhaar on The UnderTow: The High-flying Oil Industry fears “Demand Destruction.” Should the Arts?: “We have reached the point where the average American has no attention span. A 3-4 minute pop tune is all…” Jun 10, 11:22
  • Alan Harrison on The UnderTow: The High-flying Oil Industry fears “Demand Destruction.” Should the Arts?: “Brilliant piece, Doug. It’s why, in my own columns on LinkedIn and Medium, I may have become more strident recently…” Jun 8, 15:46

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Recent Posts

  • Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance
  • Still Amusing Ourselves to Death: Information as Cautionary Tale
  • The UnderTow: What the new Edinburgh Fringe Tells us about a Post-COVID World
  • The UnderTow: The High-flying Oil Industry fears “Demand Destruction.” Should the Arts?
  • The UnderTow: Subscriptions are the New Business Model of Choice. So Why are Subscriptions Failing in the Arts?

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