In the 2015-16 season, the Met took in 66 percent of its potential capacity. Some numbers are improving a bit more substantially: The company’s paid attendance rate, which includes discounted tickets, rose to 75 percent this season from 72 percent in 2015-16. And the company said it attracted 80,000 new ticket buyers this season, up from 74,000 the year before. The challenge is turning those newcomers into regulars.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Arizona’s Largest Theatre Gets A New Director
David Ivers was artistic director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City from 2011 until stepping down earlier this month to accept the same title with Arizona’s leading producer of live theater. He takes over on July 1 from David Ira Goldstein, who has led the company for 25 seasons — including the current one, which was nearly canceled in the midst of a financial crisis.
“The Walrus” Lit Mag Editor Quits Over Cultural Appropriation Comments
“The editor-in-chief of The Walrus resigned late Saturday after mounting criticism, including from some of the magazine’s own contributors, for his role within a swirling controversy over the toxic subject of cultural appropriation.”
Are “The Arts” Really A Brand?
“One problem is that all of those organizations that have their own individual brand within our sphere, very few, if any at all, spend any concerted or coordinated effort at pushing for the overall sector brand change. What is needed is consideration by every organization, that in addition to marketing itself as valuable, is the simultaneous marking of the value of the overall arts. And not just in times of defending the arts against specific attacks such as the recent NEA issue. And, of course, countless of our organizations unable to do much about their own brand.”
Before There Was Modern Behavioral Economics, There Was Plato…
“Almost 2,500 years before the current vogue for behavioural economics, Plato was identifying and seeking to understand the predictable irrationalities of the human mind. He did not verify them with the techniques of modern experimental psychology, but many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky. Seminal papers in behavioural economics are highly cited everywhere from business and medical schools to the social sciences and the corporate world. But the earlier explorations of the same phenomenon by Greek philosophy are rarely appreciated.”
TV Ratings Are Way Down. But Does Anyone Care?
This is not the same thing as saying, “Ratings don’t matter anymore.” We’re not in a post-ratings world — at least not yet. As long as revenue from advertisers remains part of the network TV business model, ratings will matter. Broadcasters aren’t Netflix or HBO. They still want to live up to their name and find shows with a broad appeal, like This Is Us or The Big Bang Theory. But after a decade of audience erosion, including double-digit declines for the vast majority of shows this season, networks have finally accepted reality: People aren’t watching the TV the way they used to, and selling commercials isn’t enough to pay the bills (and make a big profit).
In A Challenge To Hollywood, The World’s Largest Movie Studio Is Being Built In China For $8.2 Billion
Projected to open officially in August next year, it will contain the world’s largest production facility: 400 acres, 45 sound stages, one a record-breaking 10,000 sq metres. It’s an attempt by Wang Jianlin – China’s richest man and the founder of the overarching Dalian Wanda group – to steal some of Hollywood’s thunder.
Was “Cool” Ever Really Cool?
In its origin, cool was a creation of African-American jazz musicians to face the pressure of Jim Crow arrangements during a time when the United States was an unembarrassedly racialist white society. At various points in its history, cool was, in Dinerstein’s language, “the aestheticizing of detachment,” “an emotional mask, a strategy of masking emotion,” “a public mode of covert resistance,” “a walking indictment of society,” “relaxed intensity” played out through the jazz musician, who was “global culture’s first non-white rebel.”
Are Pop Music Lyrics Really Poetry? (The Answer Is Poetic)
Adam Bradley’s answer to the dorm-room question is nuanced but unequivocal, and boils down to this: Pop lyrics are not by themselves poetry, but pop songs can be. He does not fall into the trap of treating pop lyrics as technically equal to the heights scaled by great poetry; he understands that “song lyrics need music, voice, and performance to give them life.” He denies the need for “creating a canon of pop lyrics, so that Steven Tyler can sit with Shakespeare,” instead proposing a superb formulation: “Pop,” he writes, “is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all.”
Do You Believe The World Keeps Getting Faster? Then You’re An Accelerationist
“Over the past five decades, and especially over the past few years, much of the world has got faster. Working patterns, political cycles, everyday technologies, communication habits and devices, the redevelopment of cities, the acquisition and disposal of possessions – all of these have accelerated. Meanwhile, over the same half century, almost entirely unnoticed by the media or mainstream academia, accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.”