This notion that the ultimate measure of American educational value is economic is an impoverishing one. We measure for success. If that measure is earnings then we optimize for earnings. Social value measured on an earnings scale doesn’t just get deprioritized, it doesn’t exist.
Is Trump’s Wreckage of the Kennedy Center an Opportunity for Something Better?
The Kennedy Center is a treasure. Not just for what it has been, but because of what it represents. But the practicalities of providing a roof for a bunch of artistic enterprises that essentially have nothing much to do with one another — or worse, having to squabble dysfunctionally among themselves for resources — are an argument for the need for something better.
AJ Chronicles: Google Just Changed the way We’re Going to Find Culture
What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.
AJ Chronicles: Hollywood, 6; Non-Profit Arts, 1
Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century. The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once. Now there may no choice. But what’s the case?
AJ Chronicles: The Venice Biennale Blows Up — Some Takeaways
Culture awards of all kinds have been steadily losing their currency over the past decade. So what’s going on?
So Just How Big is the Culture Audience? (comparisons that may make you rethink)
By revenue, the nonprofit arts sector is small — about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney’s annual revenue alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution in the country combined. But the map of audience shows something entirely different.
AJ Chronicles: Are Our Attention Spans Killing Culture or Reassembling It?
Depth hasn’t disappeared. Perhaps it’s gone lateral. The vertical architecture that produced “official” cultural memory has cracked, but the appetite for tradition — for context, for lineage, for the why — has migrated to wherever audiences and individuals can build their own context and throughlines. Sometimes those lines are deep obsessive sturdy. Sometimes they are skimming across the surface of micro-videos and news of the day.
Just How Big is the Culture Economy?
Most arts policy debates happen at one scale. Most cultural activity happens at another. It turns out the gap between those two scales — between the world that the arts, funding fights, and nonprofit board meetings live in, and the world where most people actually encounter culture — is so large that it’s worth pausing to measure.
AJ Chronicles: Perils of Philanthropy — The Metropolitan Opera
We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe] this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter was not the eye-popping […]
LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum?
LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters who came after?
The white cube gallery was modernism’s insistence that art speak for itself. But it was invented for audiences who already spoke the vocabulary. It assumed the context was already in the viewer’s head. The Geffen revives this for audiences who may not carry that context. Whether that is a brilliant adaptation, a beautiful concession, or just plain incoherence, is the open question of the building.
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