“We are seeing that American series have become more niche and thus less attractive for our big free-to-air networks. Viewers, particularly younger viewers, are more likely to watch U.S. series on a digital platform or online.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Art Market Slump? This Week’s Auctions Suggest Otherwise
“Three major contemporary art auctions this week brought a total of 229 million pounds, or about $280 million — a sharp increase over the £152.2 million raised by equivalent events in February 2016. The sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips suggested the world’s wealthiest collectors were eager enough to spend money in London.”
Website Aiming To Be The Rotten Tomatoes Of Theatre Raises $2 Million
The new funds, ponied up by a group that includes Hollywood veteran Gail Berman and Gilt Groupe and Business Insider founder Kevin Ryan, will go in part toward expanding Show-Score’s activities beyond New York to markets that have expressed interest in the site, both in the U.S. and in London. The money also will help sustain exploratory efforts at what Show-Score founder Tom Melcher calls “harnessing the story of the audience’s reaction to theater,” including fan art, Instagram posts, videos and photography.
Why A Bronze Statue Of A Girl Is Standing In Front Of Wall Street’s Rampaging Bull
“The temporary statue — named “Fearless Girl” and placed overnight Monday by McCann New York advertising agency and its client, Boston-based State Street Global Advisors — may be a stunt to draw attention to the index fund giant’s campaign to get more women into board roles against the backdrop of International Women’s Day and the anniversary of the launch of an exchange-traded fund that tracks companies that have higher levels of gender diversity in its leadership.”
Art Is Getting Very Political. So Where’s The Beauty?
“At a time when humanity faces real existential threats, a lack of purely beautiful contemporary artworks may not be a foremost concern. But I wonder what future generations will think when they look back at what was made in 2016, 2017 and in the remainder of this administration. Will they be inspired and taken? Or will they simply laugh at all the gold?”
Martin Filler: How The New World Trade Center Ended Up A Great Big Mess
“Who was really in charge of the undertaking remained a persistent and vexing question. As the latest studies make abundantly clear, the transformation of the World Trade Center site was hampered to a shameful degree by the intransigent self-interest of both individuals and institutions. As a result, an effort ostensibly meant to display our country’s unified spirit in response to an unprecedented calamity instead revealed that communal altruism of the sort that helped America to survive the Great Depression and triumph in World War II had largely become a thing of the past. Although all major construction schemes face tremendous problems, the World Trade Center rebuilding encapsulates everything that is wrong with urban development in a period when, as in so many other aspects of our public life, the good of the many is sacrificed to the gain of the few.”
Berlin’s New Gehry-Designed Boulez Hall: Music Of Intimacy And For Thinking
Frank Gehry’s oval design, with no stage, merely a center, genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible salle modulable, the possibility of the “thinking ear”: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest possible distance between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is just 14 meters. There is intimacy—the intimacy, its initiators hope, of collaborative endeavor.
Bill Arnett’s Alternative Version Of American Art History
Bill Arnett says he believes that Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and others aren’t just great artists; he argues that in a colorblind world, they’d be held in the same esteem as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning. He’s been so aggressive making this argument that more than once he’s been kicked out of museums. But there are those who appreciate his unyielding passion.
SXSW Says It Will Amend Its Artist “Deportation” Contract Clause
Following an avalanche of criticism over what some bands said was a “deportation clause” in its performance contract, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., which starts Friday, released a statement on Tuesday saying that it would amend its agreements starting in 2018. The organizers of the festival, however, furiously denied that the language in its contracts over the past five years had been designed to encourage the deportation of foreign artists visiting the United States to perform at its event.
How Did Icebergs Get To Be Such Powerful Metaphors?
For much of modern history, icebergs have helped us speak about deeper reservoirs of meaning. The phrase “just the tip of the iceberg” has, at least since the environmental movements of the Sixties, expressed the idea that there is much more to something than meets the eye. As the historian William Cronon observes, internalizing nature through language like this is our best way of understanding it—and ourselves.