A lot of the stories about AI and art right now are about legal issues -- artists and content companies suing Big AI for copyright infringement -- or reporters prompting AI models to create essays, novels, poetry or images and then explaining why AI will never be able to truly compete with human artists. Both stories, in my opinion, are distractions. (current copyright law never anticipated how AI … [Read more...]
American Orchestras Could Learn Something from South Dakota
Infinite choice of music in a few clicks sounds like a dream. In reality it can dull your desire and lead to what the social psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the “paradox of choice,” a kind of paralysis in decision-making that causes many of us to disengage altogether. Culture is like relationships; you get more out of them when you’re asked to invest something. So I can’t discount the context … [Read more...]
Inflection Point? A Crisis in Paying for Culture in the Age of Abundance
We’re consuming more culture than ever: The audience has never been bigger, and its appetite in the mass-distraction marketplace seems insatiable. But what does 13 billion YouTube views mean? Justin Bieber has 111 million Twitter followers. Is he really that smart? Or entertaining? Or even have much to say? [How algorithms magnify these numbers is a topic for another day] Despite the … [Read more...]
Still Amusing Ourselves to Death: Information as Cautionary Tale
It might seem like our current information glut is without parallel, but throughout history observers have worried about the impact of too much information on our ability to rationally process and make sense of it. When we moved from an oral storytelling culture to print with the invention of the printing press. Or with the invention of the telegraph, which allowed our thoughts to be transmitted … [Read more...]
The UnderTow: What the new Edinburgh Fringe Tells us about a Post-COVID World
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the world's largest arts festivals, with over 3 million visitors each August. Last week it announced a series of major reforms to the ways it does business and treats employees and artists. It pledged to work towards lessening its environmental impact, and instituted new rules to "manage the scale" of the festival over the coming years. It's both a recognition … [Read more...]
The UnderTow: The High-flying Oil Industry fears “Demand Destruction.” Should the Arts?
Oil prices are at a record high. And profits are rolling in. But there's an intriguing phenomenon in the oil industry called "demand destruction." It means when prices get too high for too long, consumers invest in alternatives and don't return. The arts have faced their own version of demand destruction when COVID shut down live performances. Is there anything to be learned from how the oil … [Read more...]
The UnderTow: Subscriptions are the New Business Model of Choice. So Why are Subscriptions Failing in the Arts?
Many of the world’s largest companies have opted out of traditional retail transactions in favor of subscription models. Whether it’s software, newspapers, movies, TV, or even food, fashion or cars, subscription schemes are becoming a go-to model. And headlines the past few weeks have been full of stories about what’s happening to subscriber-driven companies – Netflix most of all. So perhaps a … [Read more...]
This Week’s UnderTow: Why are Police Playing Disney Songs? And Why did this Orchestra Fire its Conductor for… Conducting?
This week's podcast of The UnderTow, ArtsJournal's new weekly podcast, features three stories from the past week. Sometimes stories are not exactly about the things they seem to be about at first look. Our first story is one such. You might have seen the headline in ArtsJournal about police in California playing Disney songs while investigating calls and thought "that's odd" and passed it by. And … [Read more...]
Introducing our New Podcast: The UnderTow
We look at a lot of stories at ArtsJournal. And we pick the 20 or so every day we think say something about where the culture is going or how it works. If you're a regular reader of ArtsJournal, you know that our interests range across the arts and the world of creativity, exploring ideas in science, technology and the world around us. One of the reasons ArtsJournal is valuable is that we … [Read more...]
Post-COVID Arts Observations: #3. The Future is Hybrid (or Not)
The past eighteen months while live performance venues were shut down has said a lot about how arts organizations see themselves. During COVID Lockdown Some went into hibernation, not having the resources or in some cases the imagination to go online, or else determining that the live in-person experience was essential to what they do. Others scrambled to get archived performances online or … [Read more...]