Author: Douglas McLennan

Did The Great Thinkers Of The Frankfurt School Predict Trump In The 1920s?

“Art is something that’s elevating and challenges the existing order, whereas culture is precisely the opposite. Culture, or the culture industry, uses art in a conservative way, which is to say it uses art to uphold the existing order. So the culture industry peddles an ideology that supports the prevailing power structure — in the case of America, that ideology was consumerism.”

Study: Women Fill Only 18 Percent Of Hollywood Behind-The-Scenes Jobs (Here’s How It Matters)

“We have found that year after year, when a film has at least one female director, the percentage of female protagonists goes up… people tend to create what they know. When you have women working behind the scenes that frequently translates into more female characters on screens and you tend to see more powerful female characters.”

Why Critics Fail When They Aren’t Critical Enough

Here’s the heart of the problem: The set of critics’ and audiences’ interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram. In the audience circle, the pressing question is, “Should I spend some number of the dollars I have to my name and the hours I have left on Earth on this thing?” Critics get in for free and by definition have to read or watch or listen to whatever’s next up. So their circle is filled with relativistic questions about craft and originality and wallet quality and the often unhelpfully general “Is it good?” (Some of them even have an idea of what they mean by “good”; the rest are winging it.)

A “Right” Way To Look At Art?

Time and time again, the author argues that background knowledge is not only unnecessary, but even hurtful, to truly appreciating a work of art — hence the advice to ignore wall labels and audio guides. Michael Findlay accurately points out that many people are intimidated by art, because they feel they don’t know enough to understand it, so if they could just look at it for what it is, they’d appreciate it more than if they’d known the whole artist’s biography.

London Is Losing Its Music Venues

UK Music says 35% of venues across the country have closed in the last decade. “The big problem has been in recent years that developers have moved in next to pre-existing music venues,” says the body’s chief, Michael Dugher. “All of a sudden, the people in a block of flats are complaining about the noise of a venue.”

UK Report: Ticket Fraud Is Big Business (And Getting Bigger)

New data from the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, and Action Fraud – which reports on fraud and cyber crime for the police – shows that the total recorded losses between May and October 2017 came to £1.66 million. This is made up of 3,973 individual reported incidences of ticket fraud – when tickets are purchased but don’t arrive, or turn out to be fake. This is an increase from the 2,885 reports recorded over the same period in 2015.

LA County Museum And Autry Museum Join Their Collections Together

“The idea is to treat our collections as one and for our curators to work together accordingly,” LACMA director Michael Govan said in the announcement. “This exchange of works and ideas will allow both museums to bolster exhibition content especially in the areas of the historical and contemporary American West and the exploration of indigenous cultures across the Americas.”

Thw World Health Organization Wants To Classify Video Game Addiction A Disease. These Academics Object

Last week, a group called the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, which describes itself as a platform for higher education leaders to “underscore the cultural, scientific and economic importance of video game programs in colleges and universities,” published a statement that strongly objected to the WHO classification. The alliance described the proposal as “premature” and said it was based on research into gaming addiction that showed “a clear lack of consensus” from scientists and doctors.