“The North American box office closed out the year with $11.4 billion in ticket sales, ComScore said Sunday. That marks a new record for the industry, bypassing the previous high-water mark of $11.1 billion that was established in 2015.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Fascinating Debate In Ohio About How To Give Public Money For The Arts
“The idea of public support for the arts, and especially for individual artists, is a pretty progressive idea. It takes some convincing, even in a largely Democratic place. And despite the fact that just last year Cuyahoga County voters overwhelmingly renewed the cigarette tax for the arts, distrust by artists of the organization they worked to establish could erode that support pretty quickly. The tragedy of that—besides the obvious—is that the individual artist program is, at three percent, a tiny fraction of Cuyahoga Arts Council’s grant making.”
NY City Opera Attempts To Rise From The Dead
“It was less than a year ago that it emerged from bankruptcy under new management after a bitter court fight and began staging operas again. Now it must woo back audiences and skeptical donors, and navigate a cultural landscape that has changed dramatically since the heyday of the old company.”
Diversifying: Eighteen Curators To Watch In 2017
“Over the past year, a number of African Americans have accepted prestigious appointments at important art and cultural institutions across the country. These curators and cultural leaders to watch are in positions to drive exhibition programming, acquisitions, innovations in what is considered art, influence hiring, fellowship and internship opportunities, and how institutions grow their audiences.”
How Technology Has Transformed Cinematography
“In modern times, cinema became the tenth muse. Why? Because it’s nourishing itself from literature, from architecture, music, philosophy… What that means is that even if you don’t know it, you have to deal with those elements. New technology brought to us the consciousness of making images. Today you have any still camera, any video camera, you push a button, things happen automatically. Today film students don’t know anymore how to realize an image. At the beginning, the so-called photographers had to practice, they had to study how to do it. The same thing was for cinematography. You grow up in learning how it’s possible to use a piece of mechanic and some chemistry to turn an idea into a realized image. Today, nobody knows. You don’t need to know. You push a button and get an image.”
A New Era For “Gay” Plays?
“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype. You might argue that it’s a sign of progress that these writers felt no compunction in writing about troubled, lonely gay characters. Nobody seeing any of these plays today would come away assuming it represented the sum total of gay men’s experience.”
Six Questions For The Art World As We Enter 2017
“Once, perhaps, the contemporary art world was composed of small, more or less local communities of struggling creatives who scraped along by helping one another and relying on the munificence of the occasional wealthy doyenne (who typically had bohemian leanings). But, for a while now, that art world has really been an art industry, vast and global in scope, epitomized by mega-galleries with dozens of employees and multiple locations, and patronized by the winners of the global economy who see new artworks as the ultimate status-boosting luxury commodity.”
This Weekend’s AJBlogs Highlights
Music To Say Goodbye To 2016 To WELL, one of the worst years in recorded history is over. Every morning, as my consciousness returns, I am reminded that Leonard Cohen, Bowie, George Martin, and my dad are dead and that a … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2016-12-31
12 Plays of Xmas: 5 Alkestis by Euripides/Anne Carson For most of these 12 Plays of Xmas, I can imagine how they might be staged, what tone the cast and production team might hope to achieve. But Alkestis… Alkestis is just weird. Euripides’ … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-12-31
The Year in CultureGrrl, 2016 Edition In my 2015 yearly round-up post, I crowed about a high point of my CultureGrrl career—the munificent Art Writers Grant awarded to my blog by Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. In keeping with the general … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-12-30
12 Plays of Xmas: 4 The Roaring Girl by Middleton & Dekker It’s pantomime season, which is as good a time as any to pay tribute to the fine British traditions of smutty humour, sexual confusion, homosexual panic and coming over a bit funny when you … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-12-30
Fake News? Try Fake Conferences And Fake Scientific Journals
“There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.”
2016 Was The Year That Book Sales Turned A Corner
“The notion that owning a bookstore is akin to an act of altruism has become a little outdated. In fact, 2016 offered encouraging evidence that after years of dire news stories about the literary industry selling books has once again become sensible business. To be fair, the past year was less a book boom than a hold-steady.”