Author: Douglas McLennan

Color? What’s That? Neuroscience Is On The Case

“Colors are something we experience, individually and collectively. But without our experience of color, science would have no reason to suspect its existence. There would just be fifty shades, or more likely fifty thousand shades, of electromagnetic waves. That is why even a Nobel Prize-winning biologist like Gerald Edelman tells us that reality is actually colorless; because he takes reality to be what science tells us it is, not what he experiences as an individual.”

Tragic Oakland Fire Spotlights Artist Housing Problem

“The horrific event could lead city officials to go after illegally converted warehouses across Oakland, especially as evidence mounts that building inspectors knew of numerous problems with the Ghost Ship property but didn’t take action. Already, Oakland tenants housed in similar spaces are receiving eviction notices, and Mayor Libby Schaaf announced that the city is considering new fire and emergency exit regulations for its buildings. But any decision to condemn residences where artists are living illegally or force their owners to bring them up to code has led to worries that Oakland might hemorrhage more artists as housing costs continue to rise.”

Teaching Critical Thinking Skills? Well, Maybe It’s A Waste Of Time?

“Since the early 1980s schools have become ever more captivated by the idea that students must learn a set of generalised thinking skills to flourish in the contemporary world – and especially in the contemporary job market. Variously called ‘21st-century learning skills’ or ‘critical thinking’, the aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain; these are lauded by business leaders as an essential set of dispositions for the 21st century. Naturally, we want children and graduates to have a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. It’s a shame, then, that we’ve failed to apply any critical thinking to the question of whether any such thing can be taught.”

Claim: Small Presses Are Doing The Heavy Lifting In the Publishing Business

“Are big publishers unwilling to take risks any more? Increasingly, ‘risky’ authors, those who’ve been rejected over and over again by traditional publishers or dozens of agents, are being picked up by small presses whose modus operandi is to take risks on literature that is exciting, innovative, or that they deem important either stylistically or politically. Then the big publishers swoop in and profit from the hard work and risk-taking of the small presses.”

Study Puts Some Numbers On How Silo-ized Theatre-Goers Are

We like to talk about an “arts community” as if it’s really a thing, but in fact, art is a very personal experience, and people tend to be fans of who they like rather than the art form generally. They go to specific artists or plays or museums. New music fans aren’t necessarily interested in baroque music or opera or Mozart. The audience that shows up for the ballet is completely different from the one that goes to fringe theatre.

A study by TRG Arts of Washington DC theatre puts some numbers to the silo-ization of the city’s theatre audience. Though the number of people going to theatre generally in DC is up significantly over a decade…

The results pointed to a 13 percent increase in theatergoing households and a 25 percent increase in households buying single tickets. It even showed that D.C. theater outpaces the national rate of getting audiences to buy subscriptions — the companies realized a 20 percent increase during the decade in question.

… about 85 percent of the theatre audience goes only to a single theatre. In other words, they’re loyal to the place or company they like rather than the art form writ general. Each of the seven theatres TRG tracked has a specific profile:

Even beyond the core seven troupes that TRG studied, Washington theaters make it their business to be different — in style, in size and in price. Finding the portals to smoothly propel audiences from one stage to another is the ongoing challenge.

So when we talk about “the arts community” what is it we actually mean?

When Jazz Was Cool It Was A Different World

“TV is now enjoying a vogue of being cool, but the great era of TV cool was the 1950s. You could catch Miles and John Coltrane on TV, and jazz was all over its soundtracks. That and the movies were the mediums with the broadest and deepest reach in popular culture, and they brought jazz to millions in America and around the world. It wasn’t that they had to convert audiences into thinking jazz was cool, it was that jazz was inherently cool and hip, and movies and television used that to signify their own place on a spectrum of style, and even rebellion.”