My last post trying to make sense of the landscape in arts and culture in 2025 was something of an autopsy of the year that traditional 20th business models for culture finally broke. Now I'd like to propose a blueprint for rebuilding. Yes, I mean rebuild and not recovery. You recover from a bad season; you don't recover from a climate shift. You adapt. To do that, I'd like to step back a bit … [Read more...]
Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025
Over the past few weeks on ArtsJournal we've been showcasing year-end reviews of highlights (and low-lights) of a turbulent year in culture. But when you spend every morning scanning websites, blogs, and newspapers for what to put in our daily ArtsJournal report, you aren't just scanning for news; you’re monitoring a seismograph. Most days, it’s background noise—a hiring here, a firing there, a … [Read more...]
Making the Creative Turn: Is Using AI Cheating?
At the newspaper I worked at in the 1980s, there was the story of the longtime reporter who came in to work the day after computer terminals were installed in the newsroom. He went to his desk, where, in the spot where his typewriter had sat for decades, a giant new monitor with a blinking green cursor awaited. He looked at the screen, picked up his bag, and said “I’m done,” never to … [Read more...]
How Should we Measure Art?
In the wake of 9-11, security experts wanted more data to detect threats to security. In the explosion of data collection that followed, it became obvious that more data created more noise, perversely in some cases making it more difficult to see embedded threats rather than less. More is not always better, and data is meaningful only if a.) you're measuring the right things, and b.) you know the … [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...]
How a Beethoven Tweet Broke Our Twitter Feed (And Other Lessons About Social Media Today)
A few weeks ago we posted a link in ArtsJournal to a piece in the Toronto Star under the admittedly provocative headline: "Time To Retire Beethoven's Ninth?" In the piece, John Terauds, who used to be the Star's staff classical music critic, suggested it might be time to put away the Ninth Symphony for a while. Why? In his words: We have the 19th-century ideal of strength in unity — … [Read more...]
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 for the arts? Multiple choice questions might measure knowledge but do … [Read more...]
Are We Building Artistic Leadership?
Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don't happen if they don't have money to be produced, but - as evidenced at an arts marketing conference where I recently spoke - the business of selling tickets seems often to determine the measure of success rather than the art. "Art" is a positioning for selling tickets. I'm currently working on … [Read more...]
The Virtual Arts – Have It Your Way?
C-NET came away from this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas pronouncing that virtual reality is going to displace traditional porn. No surprise that the porn industry leads in technology. Because of all the money in the early days of the internet, porn invested heavily in technology and pioneered pop-ups, redirects, payment collection and more. Much of your everyday internet … [Read more...]
Playing For The Screens – Is Our Obsession With Video Changing The Live Arts Experience?
One weekend last November, the biggest box-office at movie theatres throughout the UK wasn't for the latest Hollywood blockbuster (the latest "Hunger Games" movie opened that Friday). It was for a live broadcast of Kenneth Branagh’s production of "The Winter’s Tale" which was streamed live to 520 theatres in the UK and 100 more internationally on November 26. Starring Branagh and Judi Dench, it … [Read more...]
When Libraries Realize That The Most Valuable Thing They Own Isn’t Their Collections
Remember when the internet came along and everyone wondered whether there would still be a use for libraries? Oddly, just as the question was being called, in the early 2000s there was a building boom of new libraries around North America. And public libraries didn't die, they flourished, many reinventing themselves as community centers for the 21st Century. The idea of a public library is … [Read more...]
The Mass Market Ain’t What It Used To Be (And What That Means For The Arts)
What does it mean to "engage with an audience"? It's a fundamental question for anyone who makes anything. Whether it's a political party trying to win votes, Coke trying to sell drinks, an entrepreneur trying to sell an idea, or a theatre trying to sell tickets. Whole industries thrive on trying to define, quantify and strategize engagement and building audience. It breaks down into three … [Read more...]
Too Many Artists Or Not Enough Value?
Scott Timberg's book Culture Crash makes a case that the transformation of our culture right now is killing artists' ability to make a living making art. He cites a number of reasons, but in the end it boils down to the fact that with so much free culture/art available, people are increasingly unwilling to pay for the art they use, thus making it economically unviable for artists to make their … [Read more...]
Morbid Curiosity – Culture Is Dead (Move Along…)
What a week. First there was the Slate piece that declared classical music dead. Then spiked decided that pop music was over. Why is it that people keep wanting to kill off great swaths of our culture? These are only the latest in a long series of articles declaring the end of orchestras, of Netflix, TV, the demise of book stores, movie theatres, publishing, video games, the English language, … [Read more...]
The Excellence Problem
If I built the best-ever VCR, would you rush out to buy it? Of course not. Even though my VCR might be the most excellent VCR, no one cares about VCRs anymore. Being excellent at something no one cares about doesn't get you very far. What was excellent yesterday doesn't necessarily matter today. If I'm all about apples and you bring me oranges, I don't care how good the oranges are. So when … [Read more...]