“The experience of the product is bigger than the product itself,” said Donald Chesnut, who became Mastercard Inc.’s first chief experience officer in 2019. “It’s everything around it. How well does it work? How does the product feel?” Some 89% of companies employed a chief experience officer or an equivalent role in 2019, up from 61% in 2017, according to research and advisory firm Gartner Inc., which surveyed nearly 400 large companies in the U.S., Canada and U.K. about their customer experience management. – Wall Street Journal
Author: Douglas McLennan
Baltimore Symphony, In Debt, With Unhappy Musicians And Losing Its Music Director, Asks For $15M To Expand
Recommendations of the task force, created last spring to examine ways to staunch the BSO’s losses, include obtaining an extra $5.5 million through 2026 from the state government, which last year promised and later withdrew emergency funding of $1.6 million. The BSO also will attempt to increase gifts from private donors by $10 to $15 million over the next three years. The extra cash would be used to create new programs designed to increase the orchestra’s presence statewide and to provide for a 52-week performing season, which has been a demand of — and flashpoint for — the musicians union. – Baltimore Sun
Have Fun: Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images To Public
Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose—be it a postcard, a beer koozie or apair of bootie shorts. – Smithsonian
Fred Adams, 89, Visionary Founder Of Utah Shakespeare Festival
In 1961, Fred Adams — then a theater professor with two years of experience at the College of Southern Utah (now SUU) — and Barbara Gaddie, his girlfriend (they married in 1963), were in a laundromat when they hatched the idea for a Shakespeare festival in Cedar City. Adams went to Ashland, Ore., to study how the Oregon Shakespeare Festival worked. He came back to Cedar City, and cajoled the Lions Club to donate $1,000 — the entirety of the first festival’s budget in 1962. Townspeople and students built sets, props and costumes. – Salt Lake Tribune
Royal Shakespeare’s Gregory Doran Hits Back At Idea That “Wokeness” Is Threatening Shakespeare
“Dominic Cavendish fears that the woke wolves are beginning to police Shakespeare, and that ultimately they will apply a sort of politically correct censorship which will render the plays unperformable. I can’t agree with that. I think directors, especially some of the freshest and most radical today, many of whom are women, want to reveal what is most urgent, most resonant and sometimes most challenging in his work, and address those issues head on.” – The Stage
LA’s REDCAT Hires A New Director
Joao Ribas has recently worked as an independent curator and writer. In 2019 he was the commissioner and curator for the Pavilion of Portugal at the Venice Biennale and curator of a photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Kosovo. In 2018 Ribas was the director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. – Los Angeles Times
How To Make Historical Ballet Relevant
Exploring the context in which the ballets arose offers insight into their complexity, and helps us question contemporary assumptions about the choreography, librettos, and music that have survived. By pairing imagination with historical awareness, we can rediscover the experiential aspects of dance and music and gain insight into these arts as we practice them today. – San Francisco Classical Voice
Yuja Wang Upset Her Audience In Chicago When She Mixed Up The Order Of Her Program (On Purpose)
Because of cultural tradition, each audience brings specific expectations to a performance. Classical listeners, who are steeped in the European performance practices, have been conditioned to want to know as much as possible about the music before a note is sounded. Jazz audiences – who have embraced a more casual, all-American approach to listening – generally sit back and savor the sounds, recognizing standard tunes, enjoying obscure works and realizing that free-flying improvisations may have no title at all. – Chicago Tribune
Shocking: How Easily Humans Are Getting Intimate With AI
We’re witnessing a major shift in traditional social life, but it’s not because we’re always online, or because our tech is becoming conscious, or because we’re getting AI lovers like Samantha in Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). To the contrary, we’re learning that humans can bond, form attachments and dedicate themselves to non-conscious objects or lifeless things with shocking ease. – Aeon
Rem Koolhaas Discovers The Countryside (And Comes Off As A City Rube)
Having spent 50 years theorizing about cities, he grew annoyed by how much time his fellow urbanists spend theorizing about cities. So he pulled on his wellies and went tromping out into the sticks with a mixture of wistfulness and obstinate naïvete. The countryside “is largely off (our) radar,” he writes, making that parenthetical our do a lot of heavy lifting. You’d have to be a pretty serious indoorsman to be startled by some of the changes he chronicles, or to believe that the world beyond cities was ever an “ignored realm,” as he calls it. – New York Magazine