Facing slumping ticket sales and rising costs, the Metropolitan Opera is reportedly looking to cut its operating budget by 5% for the current season. “In the late 1990s, the Met often sold more than 90 percent of tickets for each season, but the box office slowed after the 2001 terror attacks,” and has never fully recovered. Projections for the current season were made with an assumption of 80% capacity, but actual ticket sales have been closer to 76%.
Blog
Is New York Losing Its Stranglehold On American Culture?
The unthinkable is occurring. New York City, the center of the cultural universe (and if you don’t believe it, just ask a New Yorker), is losing its ability to attract and retain what has come to be called ‘the creative class.’ “Skyrocketing prices on housing and professional space have driven many artists out of the very neighborhoods they helped to pioneer, and other cities, including Philadelphia and Minneapolis, have been very aggressive at luring artists their way with marketing campaigns and housing incentives.”
KC Arts: Where’s The Buzz?
Kansas City has a thriving performing arts scene, but residents could be excused for failing to notice that fact. “The little-discussed truth is that in Kansas City, the performing arts often remain a slumbering giant. Their head counts number in the hundreds of thousands annually, and their concentration of world-class talent, both imported and residing locally, is way out of scale to our city’s population… But somehow the message is not yet getting across, for reasons not easily explained. A buzz doesn’t happen overnight. But every group large and small is responsible for its part. And the time is now to start.”
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Satellite?
For all the hoopla and hype surrounding satellite radio and the criticism concerning corporate consolidation of terrestrial radio, local stations across the U.S. are continuing to plug along just like they always have. “Traditional commercial-radio executives aren’t running scared just yet. And local talk show hosts aren’t particularly interested.” The fact is that, while satellite radio may yet capture the imagination (and dollars) of the broader public, it hasn’t yet. And even if it eventually becomes a widely used service, it’s simply unlikely that terrestrial radio would be seriously threatened.
God: That Peculiarly American Obsession
“If anyone still requires proof of the gulf of difference between the US and everywhere else, look no further than the current storm-in-a-cappuccino about The Chronicles of Narnia. For weeks, it seems, there have been spats in the papers about C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s fantasy series, the first instalment of which has just been adapted as a lush blockbuster by Andrew Adamson, who directed the Shrek films, for Disney. The storm is over religion. C.S. Lewis had it; the Americans have a lot of it; the rest of us don’t, supposedly, or at least we don’t like to put a hat on it and give it a ticker-tape parade.”
Do They Sell Tickets And Paint Scenery, Too?
The revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd currently playing on Broadway is making headlines for its embrace of what could be called the ultimate in multitasking. Where most shows employ actors who traverse the stage and musicians who stay hidden in the pit, this Sweeney Todd asks everyone onstage to play their parts (and sing their songs) while simultaneously playing important instrumental parts along with the main orchestra.
James Ingo Freed, 75
Architect James Ingo Freed, who designed Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum and San Francisco’s Main Public Library, has died aged 75 of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. Freed was a longtime business partner of architect I.M. Pei, and though he never reached the “superstar” status of some of his contemporaries, he was responsible for some of his era’s most beloved buildings.
The Golden Age Of Art Collecting?
“That rarefied practice of collecting high art — from canonized old masters to contemporary works by both international art stars and marketable young upstarts — is experiencing a surge it hasn’t seen since the explosive moment in the late 1980s when the market ballooned to a thinly stretched bubble, before bursting, finally, along with the stock market, in the 1990s. According to Artprice, a Paris-based information service that lists auction prices from more than 300,000 artists, prices for contemporary art alone had risen 40 per cent this year, pushing past even the heyday of the ’80s explosion… Contemporary art, traditionally a tough sell, has also caught the fever… Put simply, the art world is in a full-blown boom.”
Complexity Coalesced
Benjamin Forgey says that James Ingo Freed’s legacy rings particularly true in the nation’s capital, where Freed’s vision for the Holocaust Museum became the cornerstone of the architect’s legacy. “As a man, [Freed] combined lots of complex opposites. He was incredibly intense yet delightfully considerate. He was brave — in the graceful way he refused to give in to the debilitation of Parkinson’s disease. His movements had almost a dancer’s grace. He was gentle yet fierce. His talents and growing independence, however, had been hidden. The Holocaust Museum changed that. It was, indubitably, Freed’s building from start to finish.”
The Exploding Trend Of The “Stupid Book”
We’ve all been there. You’ve been Christmas shopping for weeks, scouring the stores looking for just the right gift for that one impossible-to-shop-for friend, when your eyes light on a brightly colored, snappily titled tome in a stack of books by the register. In an instant, you know two things: 1) this is a decidedly useless book, devoid of any literary or substantive value; and 2) it’s pretty funny, it’s vaguely clever in a cynical, pop-culture-saturated way, and you are unquestionably about to buy it for your friend.