Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This week we collected 118 stories. Here's what I … [Read more...]
AJ Chronicles: “Future Vision” and what the Boston Symphony signaled this week
This week we collected 123 stories at ArtsJournal. Here's what I learned: The Boston Symphony's board didn't fire Andris Nelsons as its music director. Not exactly. They declined to renew his contract because he and the BSO weren't "aligned on future vision" — the board's own words, offered without apology. Not artistic differences. Not budget. Not performance. Future vision. That phrase is … [Read more...]
Some Thoughts on Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” Movie
It’s a trap to review the movie a filmmaker didn’t make. A difficult temptation as it turns out with Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the director/writer/actor’s passion project about Leonard Bernstein. Maestro isn’t really a movie about Leonard Bernstein or his career, or even about music per se. It’s not really a “biopic,” in the traditional Hollywood sense of the word. In the absence of all this, … [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...]
Is The Institutionalization Of Our Arts A Dead End?
In his essay looking back on Lincoln Center on its 50th birthday, Joe Horowitz suggests that the cultural citadel built optimistically to be a launching pad for the American performing arts, might have turned out instead to be a box canyon. Perhaps the buildings are to blame: the Met theatre is too big and unwieldy, and Philharmonic Hall and the State Theatre, despite renovations, haven't … [Read more...]
FIVE PICKS: Stories From This Week’s ArtsJournal
Welcome to our weekly "best of" ArtsJournal. These aren't necessarily the most important of the 156 stories we found this week, but they particularly caught our eye. Your #AllWhiteOscars Controversy Primer The biggest flurry of stories this week was the reaction to last week's Oscars nominations, where for the second week in a row, all the top nominees were white. The week began with talk … [Read more...]
What Makes A Great Blog(ger)? Five Observations
As inconsistent and distracted a blogger as I am, I am hardly a great blogger. But as someone who runs a network of arts blogs, I do have some observations. Great bloggers don't just get you interested in a post, they draw you into a topic. They stake out that topic, pick away at it, play with it, make you care about it. No one post explains who they are; you only get it over time, as they … [Read more...]
Why Is My Hotel Following Me? (Ah, It’s Big Data)
The hotel I stayed at in San Diego last month has been following me around for weeks. Seriously, it’s getting annoying - a one-night-stand that refuses to recede gracefully into memory. Everywhere I go on the web, it’s there waiting for me, promising me a “great location in the center of town” even though my stay has long passed. That hi-tech workout clothing I ordered online last week? (very … [Read more...]
Welcoming A New AJ Blogger: Art of the audience
I'm very pleased to welcome a new blogger to ArtsJournal today. Lynne Conner will be writing the blog We the Audience, a blog about the relationships between artists and audiences. Lynne is a professor in the theatre and dance department at Colby College in Maine, where she directs plays and teaches playwriting, performance history, and art for social justice courses. She's also a terrific … [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...]
A New ArtsJournal is coming.
It's been a while since we redesigned ArtsJournal. AJ is now 14 years old, and this will be the fifth redesign. And a new content platform as well, as the site moves to WordPress. This week we're testing the new design while I chase down bugs (for example, the site is currently loading too slowly). I'll write more about the direction the site is taking once it launches, but for now you can see it … [Read more...]
What if an Arts Organization was a MOOC?
That's "Massive Open Online Course" and they're everywhere right now. Some of the most prestigious universities are creating courses online and attracting tens of thousands of students. Among them is Curtis, the music school in Philadelphia, which became the first big music conservatory to sign up with Coursera. We live in a time in which we're overwhelmed with information, with choices. People … [Read more...]
A New Look
If you're a follower of ArtsJournal blogs, you'll notice that this blog doesn't look the same as any of the others. That's because I'm in the midst of redesigning all of AJ, starting with the blogs, and using my own as a beta test. It's not just the look that's different (and that look will continue to evolve over the next few weeks, as I work on it). I'm rebuilding the backend of AJ as well. … [Read more...]
Beware the mushy middle
The NYT's Charles Isherwood writes about what he calls the "odd-man-out" syndrome: This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears to be having a rollicking good time, while you sit in stony silence, either bored to stupefaction or itchy with irritation, miserably replaying the confluence of life circumstances that have brought you here. … [Read more...]
We're All For Technology Except When…
Nick Carr has a great post about the course of technology development. Progress doesn't always go the way we think it ought to (even if we're right).Progress may, for a time, intersect with one's own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that's just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn't care about ideology. Those who think of … [Read more...]