Anna Somers Cocks, founder and chairman of The Art Newspaper: “I am one of the very few people to have been allowed to see Mada’in Saleh, the southernmost settlement of the Nabateans, whose city of Petra in Jordan is one of the wonders of the world.” But many more people will get their chance soon, because the Kingdom’s new crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al-Saud, is making serious efforts to jumpstart tourism there.
Blog
NME Magazine Ends Print Edition After 66 Years
NME (for New Musical Express), something like Great Britain’s version of Rolling Stone, had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands in the days of The Beatles and Rolling Stones and through the eras of punk, New Wave, and Britpop. In 2015, its print sales figures down to 15,000, NME made itself free and got its circulation back up to 300,000 – for a while. (NME will continue as a web-only title.)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.07.18
Systemically Privileged
People concerned about issues related to the arts and equity (funding is just one area) have used many terms to describe the juggernaut that is the world of symphonies, ballet companies, museums, and theaters. Most of the terminology used is either offensive or absurdly complex (and/or unwieldy) … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-03-06
Romancing a High-Low Split: John Haskell’s The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
It’s hard to recall the last time I heard someone say Balanchine’s name aloud. Since his death in 1983, more and more ballet companies around the world have fueled their repertories with his visionary neo-classical … read more
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2018-03-04
Bible Bumble: Copy Confusion Muddles Museum of the Bible
My belated visit to the three-month-old Museum of the Bible during my recent Washington sojourn began inauspiciously and went downhill from there: … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrlPublished 2018-03-07
Just Because It’s (Almost) Spring, Spring, Spring
The Coltrane project (two items down) is progressing to the extent that I was able to get out the office for a short bicycle excursion. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-03-07
Oscars Telecast Falls To All-Time Low Audience
The live show was broadcast by ABC and it attracted an average of 26.5 million viewers according to Nielsen, a 20 percent decline on last year’s 32.9 million. The previous record low was set in 2008 when 31.8 million viewers tuned in to watch Jon Stewart host the event. That year, Oscar chaos was narrowly avoided after an 11-week writers’ strike in Hollywood.
Podcasts Have Become The New Onramp To Other Media
The medium has become the creative breeding ground for daring storytelling and unique personalities to find their footing, build an audience, and then seize larger Hollywood lucre.
Have Interest Rate Swaps Trapped Chicago Arts Institutions?
Lyric Opera entered into a swap agreement in 2006 to cover $40 million in bonds. The fixed rate that Lyric’s paying is 3.8 percent, while the variable rate it’s getting in return is now 1.58 percent. Over the 12 years that the swap has existed, Lyric’s paid about $16.8 million for it. During that same period, the cost of interest on the bonds amounted to about $4 million. But Lyric is hardly alone in this. A look at financial statements from a few randomly selected cultural organizations suggests that it’s the rule for our major institutions, not the exception.
The Complications Of Image Appropriation
How can artists responsibly use images that are not their own, especially when those images are tied to the history of another culture? And how can museums display such work while respectfully engaging with marginalised communities?
How AI Took Over A Community Of Knitters
“The knitting project has been a particularly fun one so far just because it ended up being a dialogue between this computer program and these knitters that went over my head in a lot of ways. The computer would spit out a whole bunch of instructions that I couldn’t read and the knitters would say, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read.”
Online Movie Ratings Are Dominated By Men (Does It Matter?)
Women accounted for 52 percent of moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada in 2016, according to the most recent annual study by the Motion Picture Association of America. But on the internet, and on ratings sites, they’re a much smaller percentage.
Report: Arts Economy In Colorado Now Bigger Than Mining, Agriculture
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts on Tuesday unveiled their most recent analysis of the economic impact of arts and culture in the U.S. In 2015, the year with the most recent reporting data, goods and services generated by museums, architecture firms, artists and other artistically inclined businesses and agencies accounted for 4.3 percent of the Colorado’s GDP, the feds say. It was part of $763.6 billion arts and culture contributed to the U.S. economy as a whole that year, 4.2 percent of GDP and more than mainstay industries like agriculture and transportation. Creative industries accounted for a $20 billion trade surplus that year, according to the analysis.