Category: AUDIENCE

Reconsidering The Audience-Artist Contract (Let’s Stop Walking Out On Work We Don’t Get)

Maura Hogan, in a Spoleto Festival USA post-mortem: “Perhaps some among us view our annual arts dive as simply transactional. The customer is always right, so we can bolt from or belittle performances as we see fit. I would argue that we are missing the point. Ditching a performance mid-show is at best disruptive, and potentially far more insidious. … What’s more, if you truly have pride in place regarding our singular city, I can promise you that the provincial attitudes regarding its relationship with world-class performance telegraph that if you scratch the surface — if you go beyond the high-end Boho apparel and performance belt-notching — the walk-outs and sneers render us collectively a bunch of yahoos.”

Theatre Company Offers Live-Streamed, Real-Time Virtual Walk Through Houses And Streets Of Gaza

“Artists in London and Gaza are to launch a series of simultaneous, live-streamed performances this month in an attempt to connect people living under severe blockade in the coastal enclave with international audiences in Britain. Performers will use video projection as a backdrop to simulate walking through each other’s homes and streets, and interact as if they were in the same room, even as they are separated by 2,000 miles.”

Dutch Museum Invites Visitors To Watch Conservators Clean Its Oldest Painting

“Visitors to the Mauritshuis in The Hague … [will] have the opportunity to see conservators in action, when two specialists embark on a project to clean the oldest work in the Dutch museum’s collection: The Lamentation of Christ (around 1460-64) by Rogier van der Weyden and his studio. The treatment, due to be completed by the end of the year, will take place in a special studio in the institution’s exhibition galleries.”

‘Couch Shows’ Vs. ‘Phone Shows’: Why We Need More And Shorter TV Episodes

“Consumers are now, often unconsciously, sorting every media product — from podcasts to magazine stories to video — into three categories: intentional, interstitial, and invisible. The implications of these changes are huge, especially for the people who create what we watch.” Daniel H. Pink makes the case for intentional content (“couch shows” that you make a point to sit and watch) and interstitial content: “programming we use to fill the spaces in our lives — 10 minutes in a grocery store line, 5 minutes waiting to pick up a kid at practice, 35 minutes on a train or bus.”

The Roving Pops Conductor Who Says He Likes Bringing Music To The People

Stuart Chafetz says that while classical fans came because of the orchestra itself, pops fans had a different goal. “‘They were coming for the Bee Gees, or they were coming for Randy Newman, or they were coming for Jurassic Park,’ Chafetz said. ‘I often ask, ‘First time to the symphony, round of applause.’ The whole place erupted, and I thought: ‘There’s something here. … You know, this is my mission.’'”

Netflix Is Eating TV Alive, And Here’s How

Whew. This in-depth piece definitely calls the future of storytelling in favor of Netflix: “TV has gone through major transformations in the past — cable and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox toppled the hegemony of the Big Three broadcast networks in the 1980s, for instance — but this leap dwarfs all others. Netflix doesn’t want to be a streaming, supersized clone of HBO or FX or NBC. It’s trying to change the way we watch television.”

The Dance Floor: Not Just For Exercise, Also For Refuge

Chicago artist Nick Cave has made it official now, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York: He wants to use massive art/dance projects to inspire and encourage those feeling pretty down these days. “‘Empowerment’ is the word that performers have been using to describe their take on the project, and what they want to convey to the audience, [a dancer said]. In an onslaught of negativity, ‘you have two choices,’ he said. You can be discouraged and tormented, ‘or have the audacity to say, ‘I’m not going to let this break me.’'”