Critics raved, and lines stretched around the block, when The Joy Luck Club opened in 1993. The actors and director started to receive offers – and they thought the long drought of good movies and roles for Asians and Asian Americans in Hollywood was coming to an end. But “roadblocks proved shockingly resilient. Instead of ushering in a crop of Asian-American projects, The Joy Luck Club remained a token for more than two decades.” Will Crazy Rich Asians be different?
Category: AUDIENCE
How Did Netflix Become A Comedy Powerhouse?
It’s because of Lisa Nishimura, basically, the vice president of original documentary and comedy programming who convinced Dave Chapelle to return to stand-up specials for the company. And she bet big on a lot more comedy as well. “Now, 50 percent of its 130 million [U.S.] subscribers have watched a special in the last year, and a third of those viewers have watched three such shows.”
A Shocking Decline In UK Arts Teachers (And Arts Education)
Current debates about social class in the arts miss a vital point. How are working class young people going to access the arts if they don’t experience them in school?
A Crowdsourced Virtual Museum Commemorates Houston’s 2017 Floods
“What is the Houston Flood Museum? First off, it’s somewhere that can be visited only online. It’s a website, which went live last week, whose creators envision a platform where people can pool their stories from [Hurricane] Harvey and, perhaps one day, future storms. From shared experiences, they hope, will come understanding. And healing.”
Van Gogh Museum Sends High-Quality Reproductions On Tour Of U.S. Shopping Malls
It’s a straightforward outreach program to connect with people who may rarely or never visit a museum, let alone Amsterdam. But the reproductions are made with a new process the museum calls “reliefography” – and (this is in a mall, after all) some of them are available for purchase.
In China, Some Sold-Out Hit Movies Are Really Seen By Very Few People
Many investors reportedly put money into films as a stock-market manipulation scheme, buying up blocks of unsold tickets and even entire screenings so that the perception of success will push up a company’s share price. Film production is also used as a way to evade capital-flight controls and transfer large sums of money out of the country.
Some Fascinating Conjecture About National Portrait Gallery Attendance Figures
The gallery’s exhibition figures for last year and the first part of 2018—which are not in dispute, because they are ticketed and thus use a different system—will no doubt give the gallery pause for thought, because its contemporary exhibitions have been poorly attended.
Demand For New York City’s New Culture Pass Is Outrunning Supply
When the new program, which offers a pair of free tickets per year for each of 33 museums and institutions to any city resident with a library card, launched last month, thousands of people applied — and a number of venues quickly ran out of available tickets.
New Club In London Specifically For Black Theatre Audience
Says Black Theatre Club founder Steven Kavuma, “It’s a safe space environment where black people can freely talk about a play that is either about the black experience or is a classical play that has black bodies in it. We don’t have safe spaces where black people can freely talk about a play. Black people don’t feel comfortable being at theatres, because theatres are white spaces.”
Warning: UK Theatre Audiences Are Becoming More Middle Class As School Visits Decline
“The danger, or the sad thing for me, is that the wonderful audiences that come [to children’s theatre] on the whole are quite middle-class – they are the type of parents who want their children to go to the theatre. What we all desperately want is children who are not automatically going to come to the theatre because their parents wouldn’t take them, and the schools are the ones that are going to bring them.”