Dinner theatre is theatre for the old, right? So how do you attract new audiences? All arts organizations struggle with this, but dinner theatre has a stigma that younger audiences tend to reject wholesale. And when you try something new, your core audience… well it tends not to like change.
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Why Logic Misfires In The Brain
Why do people often make decisions that seem to go directly against their interests? “Neuroeconomics, while still regarded skeptically by mainstream economists, could be the next big thing in the field. It promises to put economics on a firmer footing by describing people as they really are, not as some oversimplified mathematical model would have them be. Eventually it could help economists design incentives that gently guide people toward making decisions that are in their long-term best interests in everything from labor negotiations to diets to 401(k) plans.”
Rampaging Boards – Seattle’s Got ‘Em
Seattle arts organizations are having trouble with their boards. Twice in the past year, Seattle boards have fired popular artistic directors and incurred the wrath of the community…
Experience Music Project: The Promise Fades
Five years ago, expectations for Seattle’s Experience Music Project were high. But “as the museum’s fifth anniversary approaches, things aren’t going as planned: All rotating exhibits have been canceled or frozen, and of the roughly 250 people employed by EMP, 14 percent are temps who fear their contracts won’t be renewed because attendance is half of what was expected. There’s nothing to indicate that Seattle’s interest in EMP is growing — between 2001 and 2003, admission revenues were down 46 percent.”
EMP: Secrets Abound
Seattle’s Experience Music Project is one of the most secretive (some might say paranoid) arts organizations around. Employees aren’t allowed to talk to reporters, and even the director has to be accompanied by a handler…
Angkor Looting Increases
Looting at Angkor Wat has increased in the past six months. “One of the astonishing aspects of the Angkor sites is their diminished nature at the hand of modern man. Amid the grandeur, empty pedestals, headless carvings and missing lintels cast an aura of indelible loss. The sudden cascade of tourists – one million foreign visitors came to Cambodia last year, a vast majority to Angkor – brings many risks: overcrowding, dwindling of the scant local water supply, a cheapening atmosphere.”
Back To Vinyl
Damian Thompson has abandoned digital music for the real vinyl experience. “After nearly 20 years of exclusive loyalty to compact discs, I have bought a record player – partly out of nostalgia, partly to test the theory that they produce a better sound than CD players, and partly out of irritation at the cult of the iPod. The experience has been ridiculously exciting.”
Phone Publishing
Japanese cell phone users are using their phones to read books. “Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels — classics, bestsellers and some works written especially for the medium. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card. But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavour far more enjoyable than you’d imagine.”
Michelangelo’s Self-Portrait?
Historians in Florence believe they have found a sculpted marble relief of Michelangelo that might have been carved by the artist himself. “The work speaks for itself: it is a very high-quality sculpture which depicts Michelangelo. The skilled chiselling on the back makes us think it might be a self portrait.”
Our Disappearing Movie History
“When you visit a well-stocked video store these days, it seems the full history of commercial cinema awaits your perusal, either on DVD or VHS. But this plenitude is illusory, a kind of cinematic Potemkin village. Indeed, in the United States, which has churned out the most movies of any nation over the past 100 years, it’s estimated that 50 per cent of the features produced there before 1950 have disappeared, a result of the effects of technological obsolescence, neglect, financial hardship and inadequate archiving. For films produced before 1920, the figure is 80 per cent.”