“There is a strange business model called advertising-supported media that was once restricted to a small area of our life, like newspapers, but now it is taking over every area of our life. I wanted to understand the history of advertising, because it didn’t simply always exist this way. You typically would just pay for stuff, like newspapers or movies. The idea of selling a captive audience had to be invented. And the normative question is: What are the costs of everything being free? Are we paying in other ways? There is a covenant that, in exchange for free stuff, we expose ourselves to advertising. But is that covenant broken?”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Report Scotland’s Visual Art Sector Is In Peril
“Creative Scotland’s study found that almost half of Scotland’s artists were having to take on additional jobs to make ends. Self-employed artists are said to be earning an average of less than £15,000 a year, compared to the average Scottish salary of £26,000, with even those work more than 15 years experience behind them struggling on little more than £20,000 a year on average.”
Maria Abramovic: The Performance Artist At 70
Abramovic’s performances have always been about generating a kind of catharsis for herself, then for the rest of us, pushing people’s buttons, their limits, as she has her own. All to a particular transformative end. “I am one of the few people who don’t have secrets,” she says. “All of my secrets, I made performances out of them, or theater pieces.”
First Look: Dramatic New Orchestra Hall For Beijing
The concert hall was designed by MAD Architects in collaboration with acoustic expert Yasuhisa Toyota, who has worked on the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Philharmonie de Paris, and the Suntory Hall in Japan. Its main auditorium will seat 1,600 people on “vineyard style” terraces surrounding the stage area.
Should The Smithsonian Be Running A Kickstarter Campaign To Preserve Wizard Of Oz Ruby Slippers?
“This campaign would keep the shoes’ color from deteriorating, and the money will go toward a technologically advanced display case to preserve them for future generations. Even though the Smithsonian’s museums are federally funded, the institution still solicits private and corporate contributions for major projects if it isn’t covered by their budget. In fact, this is the Smithsonian’s second Kickstarter campaign; in 2015, the National Air and Space Museum raised $700,000 to preserve the spacesuit that Neil Armstrong wore when he walked on the moon.”
MFA Enrollments Plummeting
“This year is the worst in memory, like perhaps in this millennium,” said one MFA program head, adding that his impression is that schools that were once getting two applications for every seat may now be getting less than one.
When Attention Is Always Demanded, How Do We Still Think?
“Where the human gaze goes, business soon follows.” When that gaze eventually shifted to the smartphone—portable, social, location-aware, always on—whatever last reserves of human attention were still left unexploited were suddenly on the table. The smartphone would become “the undisputed new frontier of attention harvesting in the twenty-first century, the attention merchants’ manifest destiny.”
Diversity In Theatre Isn’t About Telling “Black” Stories
“In fact, to be a black writer is one of the most liberating things a person can be. I am black and I write about whatever I want – I always have and I always will. The only thing that makes a black writer feel limited is if others try to force their own definition of what it means to be black and a writer.”
What Apple Learned About Innovation From Glenn Gould
The Canadian pianist was an innovator, a maverick who went his own way. But he had some ideas about innovation not being just for the sake of innovating…
Louis Menand: What Has Cultural Criticism Become In The Age Of Crowds?
“The cultural critic’s conceptual enemy is the smoothing formula known as ‘the wisdom of crowds.’ On that theory, it must be the case that the person whose favorite song is the No. 1 song, whose favorite book is a best-seller, whose favorite food just switched from kale to quinoa, is the luckiest person in the world, because the culture is producing exactly the goods that he or she enjoys. This rule would apply right down all the rungs of life-style choices within your demographic: the kind of car you drive, the number of kids you have, where you take your vacations. On a wisdom-of-crowds hypothesis, what most people who are like you choose to do should be the optimal choice for you.”