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 […]
Archives for August 2016
In The Church Of Big Data, Artistic Judgment Is Just A Data Point
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 […]
What Happens When Critical Opinion Separates From The Audience?
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 […]
This Week’s AJ Highlights: That Time Ballet Superstars Nureyev And Fonteyn Got Arrested In A “Hippie Raid”
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 […]
Is Naked Trump Bad Satire? (And Do We Care?)
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 […]
Why Aren’t We Driving Self-Driving Cars Yet? It’s All About The Culture
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 […]
How Dance Will Help Teach Us About The Next Transformative Technology
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 […]
Who’s Telling Your Story? (Storytellers Are Leaders)
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 […]
This Week In Culture – Some ArtsJournal Highlights
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 […]
When All The Culture Around Us Starts To Look The Same
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 […]
Culture Trends: Five Stories From The Week’s ArtsJournal That You Shouldn’t Miss
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 […]
How Do You Test For The Arts?
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 […]
Five Essential Stories From Last Week’s ArtsJournal Haul, Context Edition
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 […]
When We Allow Technology To Police Our Culture…
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 […]
Trump, The Tenor, And Fascism
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 […]