Author: Douglas McLennan

Why Isn’t New Opera At Least As Smart As Good TV?

“When was the last time you came out of a new opera — or ANY opera — feeling that you had had a vital, exciting dramatic experience? When was the last time you felt you had lost yourself in another world? It certainly happens. But in general, we judge opera by different standards. We don’t expect it to be as gripping as a work of spoken theater. The long passages of music, and the pace of the singing, slow everything down.”

So Banksy’s Balloon Girl Was Voted “Best-Loved” Art Work In Britain? OMG

Under its fake radicalism, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is the kind of sentimental tosh our great grandparents too would have voted as Britain’s best-loved. Its kitsch pathos resembles one of the most popular Victorian images, John Everett Millais’ painting Bubbles, a picture of a child blowing bubbles used as an advert for Pear’s Soap. Today we laugh at it and sneer at them for liking such soppy stuff. Imagine how future generations will mock us for sanctifying Banksy, the Boaty McBoatface of modern art.

New York Developers Fight To Get Name Artists To Make Work For Their New Condo Projects

“New residential developments across the city are installing significant works by artists both emerging and established in outdoor plazas, lobbies, common spaces and model units. Where developers previously battled over big-name architects and all-out amenity spaces, from pet spas to hamams, many are now turning their attention to outsize art projects.”

Marshall McLuhan’s Ideas Only Become More Relevant As Time Goes On

“The splintering of traditional media, the hostility of contemporary politics, the ways in which modern technology pulls us together while at the same time driving us apart – if you look, you’ll find traces of it in McLuhan’s work, which explored subjects ranging from pop culture to mass media to the ways in which technology would affect our ways of communication, decades before cellphones or the Internet. He was an avatar of the future, ironic considering his own, pessimistic view of things”

Philadelphia’s Army Of Theatre Voters

Theatre Philadelphia expanded the pool of nominators this year from 60 to 70, “to ensure we had all the voices in the room — race, ethnicity, people not on the binary, the LGBTQ community. “We wanted our nominator pool,” he said, “to reflect what we want to see in our theater audiences.”

How Do The Arts Make A More Appealing Case For Funding To Philanthropists?

It is this notion of competition that has preoccupied the case for the arts for much of the past ten years, leading to a greater focus on impact and evidence of outcomes than ever before. And while the resulting improvements in measurement and evaluation are in many regards enhancing the offer the sector makes, it is an argument we can never win and which in fact misses the point.

How Data About Writing Is Changing Writing

“A few decades ago, the advent of the word processor made it easier than ever to revise on the fly; it also made it easy to dwell on one sentence ad infinitum, gilding the lily where once one would’ve advanced to the next thought. The glut of data is another mixed blessing—past a certain point, writers would do better in a state of blissful ignorance.”