“For my generation, editing your own image has become as routine as using social media. We grew up with airbrushing and Photoshop and saw the exposés of flawless magazine cover stars who weren’t flawless at all. Instead of rejecting the falsehoods we’ve made it part of our daily lives, crafting idealised digital versions of ourselves that feel like an essential corollary to real life. Technology has set a new standard for beauty that quite literally doesn’t exist in real life. Rather than reject that, we’ve embraced it.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Huge Data Set On Audience Buying Behavior Released
There are now more than 600 organisations participating in Audience Finder, including “performing arts venues, touring companies, museums, galleries, festivals, outdoor arts and many other kinds of cultural organisations”. Their ticketing data has been gathered over the past seven years and dates back to 2011/12, although data from these early years is less comprehensive and accessible than more recently gathered information.
Cathedral Gets Pushback For Showing ‘Wicker Man’ In Movie Series
The autumn film series at Derby Cathedral in the English Midlands includes The Wicker Man (which features female nudity and a pagan sacrifice), Don’t Look Now (sex and seances), and The Life of Brian (the Gospels get the Monty Python treatment). Says one church warden from the diocese, “I just think it isn’t appropriate to show these films in a place of worship that is consecrated and hallowed.” Responds the Cathedral’s dean, “The first thing we’re trying to do is open the cathedral to new people. It doesn’t just belong to the people who go to church; it certainly doesn’t belong to me.”
Met’s ‘Heavenly Bodies’ Exhibition Passes Million-Visitor Mark
On Thursday, August 23, after just 3½ months, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” received its one millionth visitor. The show is now the most popular in the history of the Met’s Costume Institute and the third most-visited the entire museum has ever presented. (And it still has six weeks left to run.)
Letting The Audience Onstage Can Have A Powerful Effect, Even If It’s Not During The Show
Howard Sherman: “The convention of the fourth wall is deeply ingrained in most regular theatregoers … But when such techniques [for breaking it] are deployed intentionally before, during and after a performance, the effect can be magical. … There needn’t even be a show in performance for the effect of bringing audiences on stage to have an impact. Even in smaller spaces, let alone iconic ones, allowing patrons to stand where the actors perform creates an inversion that can be highly affecting.”
New App Makes Bollywood Movies Accessible To Millions Of India’s Blind
“XL Cinema [is] an app developed in India that can synchronise an audio description of a movie with its cinema audio track. … Before the app’s arrival, the only way to watch a movie with audio description was to wait months after the film’s release to order a DVD from [the NGO] Saksham, if [it] had created one for that film.”
Can North America’s Shakespeare Theatres Expand Their Audiences Without Losing Their Reason For Existing?
Peter Marks: “One can sense, in visiting … companies and talking to leaders of classical theaters across North America, a revolution in how to package Shakespeare is not only gradually gaining momentum but is also being viewed as essential. At Stratford, for instance, an ethos prevails of theater as not simply a passive entertainment. More and more, it’s a conveyance for other social and intellectual activities on the sprawling festival campus.”
For Orchestras, Programming Music By Women Isn’t Just Doing The Right Thing – It’s Smart Audience Development
Peter Dobrin: “This is not about righting a social injustice, though programming more women is clearly that. … The predilection for passing through the graduated hoops of listener to subscriber to donor hinges upon emotion … [and] it means a lot to listeners when they see their own identity reflected in what their orchestra does.”
Maybe Consuming Less “News” Would Be Better For Us?
Perhaps it’s time we realize that consuming more news about the world around us is not the way to improve it (or ourselves), personally or politically. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”
Our Phones Are Changing The Ways Families Behave
A new nationally representative survey about “screen time and device distractions” from the Pew Research Center indicates that it’s not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones—many teens themselves do, too. Fifty-four percent of the roughly 750 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed said they spend too much time absorbed in their phones, and 65 percent of parents said the same of their kids’ device usage more generally.