The data, which look at the economic role of the arts at the federal level, show that the arts and cultural sector contributed nearly $730 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014, the year for which the agencies evaluated data. That is roughly 4.2% of the U.S. economy for that year. (The NEA’s annual budget, as a point of comparison, is $148 million.)
Author: Douglas McLennan
How To Attract New Audiences To The Arts? Report Says Focus On Fun
Key to the success of projects is promoting “the ‘fun’ and ‘social’ aspects of participation as opposed to focusing on the artistic aspects of activities”. The report notes that using “exclusive ‘arts’ language and jargon” acts as a barrier to encouraging local communities to get involved.
Can Theatre Spur Action On Climate Change?
“The time for reckoning is over. It’s time for action. And for action to be effective, we need inspiration. Doomsday scenarios won’t galvanize us; we need hope and a capacity to imagine the future we want to create. In short, we need new narratives. And who better to provide those than writers?”
Why Do We Treat Arts Education As Remedial Activity Rather Than Enormous Possibility?
“While most community arts programs for underserved youth were planned by caring, well-intentioned organizers, they are doing serious harm. They are designed to mitigate risk — to treat participants not as creative talent full of ideas and possibility, but as disadvantaged youth or, worse, cautionary tales in the making. Their target outcomes are preventing violence or pregnancy, lowering obesity rates or other deficits attached to their community’s identity — not to prepare our country for a future of innovation and economic participation. This must change.”
Why Linda Winer Is Quitting Her Job As A Theatre Critic After 30 Years
“Winer’s beef, it should be clear, is not with her employers, about whom she had nothing but kind words in a brief interview today. She’s instead stepping down in protest over (or surrender to) the apparent collective indifference of readers to arts criticism, as a chill wind of click metrics has blown through the profession and shriveled word counts even for the most venerable of critical voices. After nearly 50 years on the aisle, Winer made clear, groveling for clicks is not how she wants to spend the rest of her life.”
The Joy With Which The Onion Imagines Orchestra Musicians Anticipate Pops Concerts
“To repeat the same sequence of eight notes over and over again while staring at the back of John Mellencamp’s head as amplified guitars and boisterous audience members drown out most of the sound—I can’t think of a greater privilege than that. The only thing better would be playing with Jon Bon Jovi, but I’m not getting my hopes up.”
How The Barnes Museum Figured Out How To Use The Cloud To Track Visitors
“Counters keep track of average visit duration in any space where we use them and by tracking at our main entrance, special exhibition, and collection gallery we have a sense of visit duration throughout the building on any given day and at any given time. This has given us the opportunity to manage queues effectively at high capacity events because we know roughly what the average stay rate is and how quickly those lines will move.”
Fifty Years Ago Canada Threw Itself A Giant Party (Looking Back, We Can See What A Different Time It Was)
1967 “was a year in which most Canadians felt good about themselves and their country.” A principal reason was Expo, which attracted more than 50 million people and was described by the respected Canadian writer Peter C. Newman as “the greatest thing we have ever done as a nation.”
NYT Classical Music Editor Talks About Attempts To Think Differently About Coverage
“How can we change what we do so that we are bringing in more readers in more places to be more engaged. It’s not a question purely of page views, but more engaged: the term that encompasses both sheer numbers and the kind of readers they are, whether they are subscribers, how long they’re spending on the articles, where in the world they’re located. So what we want in classical music, and what everyone in the paper wants, is to be bringing our journalism to a substantive and engaged readership.”
Can Literature Give You Hope?
“When reading about the feeling of hopefulness in a novel, it can become an almost tangible thing, perhaps made out of the fiber of the pages you’re turning, or housed within the blackness of the ink used to print the words you’re reading. And hope can often be easier to hang on to in literature than in real life, where it might feel ephemeral, intangible, and unsteady. And now, more than ever, hope takes work.”