Author: Douglas McLennan

Meet Oliver Dowden, The UK’s New Culture Secretary

He has a history of handling thorny issues like cybercrime and data privacy. As a Parliamentary Secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet office, Dowden was the Minister for Implementation of the Government’s technology strategy.  Though the new BBC licence fee and rolling out gigabit broadband will be pressing tasks, Dowden’s expertise and interest in digital matters could be good news for the creative industries. – Arts Professional

Learning Technology Through Dance

Dance as a basis for problem-solving is a growing field within psychology research. It underlies some of the theories behind dancing as therapy for people with Parkinson’s Disease, for example, but it has also been used to encourage creative thinking among school children. And it seems to work for STEM From Dance. Their programs’ participants reported feeling more confident about STEM courses, and some could even see themselves considering a career in the field. – Forbes

End Of The Big Glamorous Cities?

Since 2010, urban inner rings, including central business districts, accounted for barely 10 percent of population growth in the nation’s 53 largest metropolitan areas. More revealing still, the country’s three largest metropolitan areas — New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—are now losing population. Since 2012, suburbs and exurbs, which have seven times as many people as the core, are again growing faster. Suburbs are also seeing a strong net movement among educated people, those earning over $75,000 and especially those between the ages of 30 and 44. – The Daily Beast

Tough Talk On Theatre Diversity Efforts

I am a white, male, liberal administrator working in New York’s nonprofit theatre community. I see firsthand how the word “diversity” has kicked up a lot of dust throughout the industry. Yet for as long as we’ve been having conversations, and task forces, and panel discussions, and industry-wide conferences, I’m still struggling to see how this word aligns with clear, intentional, or lasting change. – Howlround

Crystal Bridges Changed The Landscape Of American Art. Now It’s Taking On Contemporary Art

The effects Crystal Bridges has had on the region are more than clear. And later this month, the museum is going one step further. It’s opening a satellite contemporary art center, the Momentary, which, by all accounts, is expected to further solidify the impact art has had on this town that once counted the Walmart Museum as one of its biggest cultural attractions. – Artnet

Art Critic Christopher Knight Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

It’s the second Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation award and comes with a $50,000 prize. Knight has been an art critic at The Times since 1989, where he continues to chronicle the growth of Southern California’s visual art scene. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1991, 2001 and 2007, and he received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for art and design criticism last year. – Los Angeles Times

An Open-Ended, Ambiguous, Multi-Perspective Opera Made To Resist Reduction

Yuval Sharon: “If there was a straightforward message, there would certainly be simpler and more direct ways to communicate it than by creating this enormous operatic experience. Opera’s power lies in its complexity and its ability to create complication, to help us experience complex visions of the world. It’s something we need more and more desperately and why I think opera has an underestimated political power. Reducibility, along with didacticism, has been something all of us have actively resisted in this process.” – San Francisco Classical Voice