Author: Douglas McLennan

A New Opera Company For Orange County? Not Likely

LA Opera continues to stage traditional and spectacular productions, Long Beach Opera forges ahead in its scrappy and innovative way, San Diego Opera provides yet another outlet for listeners. The market for opera in Southern California may already be saturated, and it may be a settled question: asking for a fully-staffed, active and sustaining professional company in Orange County that consistently delivers top-quality, fully-staged productions before packed and enthusiastic houses? It may be too much. – Voice of Orange County

How Awards Distort Our Movie And Music Culture

Awards are, it must be said, an absurdity. It is not only possible but crucial to insist on the importance or value of art without giving it a trophy. For the many who are interested in the arts, both mass-marketability and the potential for conferred prestige (i.e. awards) should be irrelevant. If those markers are your interest above the work itself, you can turn to metrics, algorithms, and trending topics, which have robust and widely-available platforms for consumption and analysis. Instead, in discussing and deciding what’s available to watch, what’s worth or not worth watching, and how movies are shaping our society, we must try to de-emphasize the validating mechanisms the industry itself provides. – The Daily Beast

Cost Of The Edinburgh Fringe Is Shutting Out Working Class Artists

“So, who can afford to perform at the Fringe regularly? Who can absorb a grand loss every year? Who can work unpaid for 17 weeks at a time? The answer is people who already have money. People who have the financial resources to take that hit year-in and year-out while they build a profile, while they experiment, while they get better at their job. Not me, and not any of my fellow working class artists – that’s for sure.” – The Stage

ARTnews’ Top 200 Collectors List For 2019

“There is this great shift in what’s going on in collecting,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. “Collectors across the board are looking for something new that is also of great quality—in concert with what’s happening curatorially in museums and in scholarly gallery shows.” The result, she said, is “shifting the conversation away from simply dead white men to artists of color and women.” – ARTnews

Study: Surgeons Perform Better With Music Playing In The Operating Room

As the study noted, music is already played in operating theatres as a matter of course by most doctors and nurses — about two-thirds, as it turns out. Participants said that listening to music reduced stress and made them feel more relaxed. Patients also reported that music played before their surgeries reduced stress levels. Almost all the respondents preferred classical music of some kind, with a slight preference for Mozart piano sonatas. Classical music was used in six of the studies, and music of choice in the others. – Ludwig Van