Category: AJBlogs

This Week In Audience: Audience Confusion Editon
This Week: Pokemon Go suggests a different relationship between real and virtual, an art prize in which critics don’t matter, museums challenge visitors to spot fakes, a French city that has reinvented itself around art, and a claim that modern audiences are confused and uncertain. … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience Published 2016-07-17

Met Layoffs: “Nobody is Ruled Out”
My Friday post about staff shrinkage, from buyouts, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art set off quite a stir: Emergency meetings were held inside the museum to discuss what was going on and the press office ramped up … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-07-17

Language Matters
Once a year, NAS gathers 24 creative changemakers from all over the nation for a week-long residential program called Creative Community House. We spend this week living and learning alongside each other, sharing ideas and experiences and chewing on new information presented by NAS and our partners. And we also debate with each other. A lot. … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-17

Communities, Complexities and Commonalities
What does community mean to you? What are the most important aspects of a community? … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-18

An invitation
Like people, communities are complex. Communities are not only defined by location, but also by human relationships and needs. … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-18

Doing Violence
Alex Ross’s thoughtful essay on vicious uses of music left a few interesting stones oddly turned.  At the conclusion, he asks us to “renounce the fiction of music’s innocence,” citing the damage that music can do.  “Either music affects the world around it or it doesn’t,” he says.  … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2016-07-18

The Met Mess: Parsing the Organizational Upheavals at the Metropolitan Museum
What do the disarray of the Metropolitan Museum’s finances and the shakeup of its senior staff say about Tom Campbell’s performance as director of this country’s preeminent art museum? … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-07-18

Monday Recommendation: Peggy Stern
Peggy Stern, Z Octet (Estrella Productions). It has been 16 years since Peggy Stern last applied her piano, composing and arranging talents to a mid-sized ensemble. Z Octet was worth waiting for. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-07-18

Is Brexit Doomed? European Music & (Little) English Country House Festivals Dispel the Gloom
We’re suffering post-Brexit gloom, and disappointment at the cabinet appointments made by the new Prime Minister. Still, there’s a lot to be happy about. Last week we drove, in under an hour (and in opposite directions), to two world-beating country house operatic performances. … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2016-07-18

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The Future of Orchestras, Part III: Bruckner, Palestrina, and the Rolling Stones

More Major Met Museum Departures – And More Woes
The exodus, and the troubles, continue at 1000 Fifth Avenue: announcement of the departure of Carrie Rebora Barratt, a deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum and longtime close associate of director Tom Campbell, is imminent. … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-07-14

They can do better
I got a press release from the Boston Symphony, advertising live streams from Tanglewood. On July 15 (tomorrow, as I write this), Pinchas Zukerman will conduct the Mozart E flat symphony, and the BSO will stream the second and thirs movements. Which seems lame. Why not the whole piece?… read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-07-14

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If you think you need a publicist …
… look for one who thinks strategically.
By which I mean the following. … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-07-13

Other Places: Desmond On Night Lights And Mosaic
Good things go around and come around, if we’re lucky. Many good things having to do with jazz show up on the Daily Jazz Gazette of the Mosaic Records website. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-07-13

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Responding to Pain
Communities are hurting. What is your arts organization doing in response? The answer to this question is a powerful indicator (forgive me: “metric”) of the depth and quality of institutional commitment to and capacity for engagement. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2016-07-12

Shiner Whiner: Warhol Museum’s Director Joins the Flight from Museum to Market
Should museum directors and curators parlay their nonprofit contacts into for-profit pursuits? … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-07-12

Other Places: Bill Crow on Dave McKenna
Bassist Bill Crow’s column “The Band Room” is an event New York musicians look forward to each month. … In the current issue, he remembers a pianist whose artistic scope, adaptability, swing and idiosyncratic personality made him a favorite of a wide variety of musicians and listeners. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-07-12

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Do Artists Have A Vision For The Future?
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, several French artists were asked to design a series of cards that would imagine what life would be like 100 years in the future in the year 2000. … read more
AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan Published 2016-07-10

Today in mathiness
Suppose I suggested that we can think about how the plot of a work of fiction is progressing according to whether the emotional valence is rising or falling. … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-07-11

I’m Back — With A Masterpiece
Caspicara. Never heard of him? He was an indigenous artist of whom Spanish King Charles II once said, “I am not concerned that Italy has Michelangelo; in my colonies of America I have the master Caspicara.” … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-07-11

A visit to the memory hole
In December of 1969, Esquire invited twenty-five venerable celebrities to offer end-of-the-decade advice, most of it predictably platitudinous, to the magazine’s younger readers. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-07-11

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Alien nation

Climate-Control Crisis Closes Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum dropped this bombshell in my inbox at 5:23 p.m.: … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-07-07

His Kingdom for a Horse: Another Bad Brexit Deal?
Please don’t mention hypocrisy or the apparent need of all current politicians to tease the truth just a little in pursuit of power. It was both uplifting and depressing to see Ralph Fiennes play Richard III in Islington while we were still reeling from the Brexit lunacy. … read more
AJBlog: Plain English Published 2016-07-07

So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-07-07

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Dancers and Puppets Rebirth the World
Fantasque by John Heginbotham and Amy Trompetter opens Bard Summerscape 2016. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-07-06

They don’t expect results
What’s in this post:

• A Boston Symphony concert poster, just as ineffective as most classical music press releases
• A theory: that these materials are ineffective because no one really expects them to do very much.
• And then, at the end, this thought: … read more

AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-07-06

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This Week in Audience: Boston Ballet’s Dive Into Data
This week: Boston Ballet has done some serious data diving to produce a successful season at the box office … NPR is finding gold in podcasts … When news becomes unmoored from its sources, do we care? … A “young” (didn’t know it was a noun, eh?) declares what will get “youngs” to the arts … Will the machines eventually determine our tastes in art? … read more
AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience Published 2016-07-05

When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable products
A couple weeks back I had the privilege to give a talk in Christchurch, NZ at an event called The Big Conversation—hosted by Creative New Zealand, the major arts funding body for the country. … read more
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2016-07-05

Injured Elvis’ Secret Tryst with Conservators: SFMOMA’s Neal Benezra Tells All
Journalists (including me) extracted only minimal information from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s press office about the “minimal” damage suffered by Warhol‘s celebrated “Triple Elvis [Ferus type],” 1963, … But Neal Benezra, the museum’s director, was more forthcoming when I caught up with him last week … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-07-05

Monday Recommendation: John Hollenbeck
John Hollenbeck Claudia Quintet, Super Petite (Cuneiform) Hollenbeck’s little band has unity of thought, purpose and execution more often found in long-lived classical ensembles than in jazz. The difference, of course, is improvisation. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-07-04

‘Dadaglobe’ — Show vs. Catalogue
Although “Dadaglobe Reconstructed”at MoMA is a magnificent project of deep-dive reclamation, the catalogue that recreates Tristan Tzara’s never-realized Dadaglobe anthology also recreates the limitations of Tzara’s original concept. … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-07-05

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