“We’ve talked about the idea of ‘radical hospitality. You meet people in their neighborhoods, in places where they’re already hanging out. Start with stories they know, things they’re familiar with.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Sundance Festival Shows Virtual Realities Challenges, Suggests Potential
“While New Frontier has shone a spotlight on VR for the past five years, 2017 represents a particularly crucial juncture for the technology. This year’s showcase comes after a full year of availability for all sorts of hardware dedicated to VR viewing. What throughout its tortured history seemed about as commercially viable as jetpacks is now a reality, bringing a newfound urgency to the content exhibited at New Frontier.”
E-Book Sales Are Falling
“Nielsen found that e-book unit sales from reporting publishers were down 16% in 2016 from 2015. Units fell the most in the juvenile fiction segment, where e-book sales dropped 28% in the year and accounted for 10% of total category unit sales in 2016, down from 14%. (E-books have never been a big factor in juvenile nonfiction and accounted for 1% of units sold in 2016.)”
Selfies As Gallery Art? Really? It Was Inevitable
“In many ways, the selfie represents the epitome of contemporary culture’s transition into a highly-digitalised and technologically-advanced age as mobile-phone technology has caught up with the camera.”
Dozens Of London Live Music Venues Have Closed In The Past Decade. But What About Those That Are Thriving?
“You create a green scene of local bands who breed. They become fond of the venue because you give them support and, even if they grow, they’ll come back and play smaller shows here.”
Pop Culture’s Fascination With Makeovers (But There’s A Dark Side)
“A fixation with ‘the makeover’ has been present in popular culture for decades. Its depiction in film, television and online has been a barometer of the shifting understandings of what it means to be an individual in the modern world, in response to changing norms of gender, youth, work and identity.”
The World’s Tiniest Art Biennale (On An Island That’s Disappearing)
It’s on the tiny Ilet La Biche, a tiny spit of land off the coast of the main islands of Guadeloupe in the West Indies, is rapidly being subsumed by the sea. “There is no land, really. You can walk around the structure but you walk in the water, basically.” The idea, he added, is that “each artwork will die on the island.”
Why Have So Many NYCityBallet Dancers Changed Their Names?
To go down the list: Melissa Hayden was born Mildred Herman; Allegra Kent — Iris Margo Cohen; Suzanne Farrell — Roberta Sue Ficker; Violette Verdy — Nelly Guillerm (even the French were doing it!); Merrill Ashley — Linda Michelle Merrill…
Matthew VanBesien To Leave The New York Philharmonic
Matthew VanBesien, 47, who has been with the Philharmonic for nearly five years, has said “he will leave to become the president of the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan, a respected campus-affiliated arts presenter. His decision to step down before his contract is up in 2018 leaves the Philharmonic with vacancies in its top managerial and artistic ranks as it prepares to face its biggest challenge in decades. The turnover at the orchestra is staggering, which threatens to make the planning process more chaotic, and give potential donors pause.”
This Year’s Oscar Nominations – Some Surprises
“Amid all the yuk-yuks and song-and-dance numbers, there are some highly-coveted gold-ish statuettes to be handed out, and this year the largely white, largely old, largely male Academy, which has taken recent steps to diversify, seems to have learned a lesson from the loud #OscarsSoWhite backlash: black stories matter.”