Okay – we’re back online. Power has been restored here in Seattle (I understand as many as 1 million people had electrical outages). The tree that met the acquaintance with the back of our house was the most impressive tree in our neighborhood. It was more than 100 years old and the trunk is wide […]

Doug: I hope you got some sleep and are dug out, as it were. As for audiences: I agree, sheep-like behavior masking a lack of conviction is bad however it’s manifested, and if today it’s manifested as automatic standing ovations, we’re agin ’em. As for my hippie roots: I was never a real hippie, whatever […]

Doug: Geez, with all due respect to Art, I would think a tree, a storm, a roof, power and family safety might just for the moment trump this conversation. I’ll respond to the rest of your 3 a.m. posting in a bit. Looking forward to your next message, but take care of priorities!

John: I had a response all but set to publish tonight when suddenly there was a huge crash and a 60-foot cedar from our neighbor’s yard toppled down and smashed the back of our house. Unfortunately there’s still about a third of this huge tree standing over our house, there’s a major wind storm blowing, […]

By John Rockwell Doug: The issue of audience sophistication and naivety is bound up with the democratization of the arts. The ideal, for those who believe the arts have been dumbed down by yahoo audiences (meaning rubes, not subscribers to that estimable e-mail etc. site), is of a Leo Straussian elite, guardians of the refined […]

John: Point taken – I’ll try to focus this entry on more or less one idea. The other day I was a guest on a CBC radio show as part of a panel talking about “applause inflation.” Of course it does seem that all anyone has to do anymore is walk on stage and get […]

Doug: By actual count there are 4,217 really good ideas in your five paragraphs. Well, maybe one or two less, but they’re all piquant and deserve response. Here’s a start: Just as artists resent others laying their taste/biases/criteria on them, so might critics object when artists (or their enabling presenters, and I was one of […]

For the next week, critic John Rockwell will be joining me in a conversation on ArtsJournal. John started working at the New York Times as a critic in 1972, and is currently the paper’s chief dance critic. He was also the paper’s first pop music critic, wrote extensively about classical music, invented a “job” prowling […]

We’ve had lots of comments on the new design for ArtsJournal – many of them positive – and then a full-throated chorus of those who find the new look wanting (ouch). I’ve changed a number of things based on these comments. The biggest change is restoring the topic groupings to the newsletters. Many complained that […]

Actually it’s more than just a new look. The entire website has been rebuilt from the ground up. Why change something that’s simple and easy to use and has worked well for the past four years? Content management systems have advanced considerably since we last rebuilt ArtsJournal, and the new system will allow us more […]

As my post below says, right after I started this blog I embarked on a major overhaul of ArtsJournal. The site hasn’t been upgraded in about four years, and it was time. Of course it’s taken much longer than I ever expected. The first version of AJ took about a week. I got the idea […]

Right after I launched this blog I delved into a major redesign of the ArtsJournal website. It’s been four years since the last redesign and not only has the look of the site become a little creaky, but the backend has needed some major work as well. The new ArtsJournal will have some new features […]

In just about a year-and-a-half, YouTube has become the biggest website on the internet. Each day 65,000 videos are uploaded to the site. One hundred million videos are streamed from the site everyday. It’s an amazing service – easy to use both as a watcher and as an uploader. People are adding video of every […]

I like the Guardian. Though it has a good stable of writers, its biggest strength is its editing. The Guardian is a consistently lively read day in and day out. This is a paper that isn’t afraid to argue with itself. A critic might sound off on some topic one day, only to be contradicted […]

Over the past three years I have talked a couple hundred people into blogging. While I’ve never considered ArtsJournal itself a blog, it does satisfy one reason to blog – pointing readers towards interesting things elsewhere on the web, and I think of the skein of these stories as a curated conversation about culture and […]