Category: AUDIENCE

Even With Free Admission, Attendance At Baltimore’s Art Museums Is Falling

“Eleven years ago, when Baltimore’s two largest art museums” – the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art – “joined a nationwide trend by announcing that they would drop admission fees, the news was applauded in newspapers from New York to Detroit to Jackson, Miss. … [But] after initial surges in attendance, museums in Baltimore and nationwide that went free soon resumed losing visitors at alarming rates. A decade later, museum officials are still scrambling to devise ways to reverse the slide.”

Virtual Reality Comes To Art (But Who Owns – Controls – What?)

Legal questions about ownership of virtual public spaces were thrown into sharp relief in October when Snapchat partnered with Koons to allow users to project his balloon sculptures in ­specific sites around the world using augmented reality (AR). In protest against an “augmented reality corporate invasion”, the artist Sebastian Errazuriz “graffiti-bombed” one of the works and placed it in the same geotagged location in Central Park as the Snapchat version.

The Problem With Theatre Outreach In Troubled Communities

Nathan Lucky Wood, on watching a play about homelessness performed for homeless youth: “A young man raises his hand. He wants to ask a question. Why have they come here to perform a play which is so depressing? Being homeless is already hard. He was excited to see a play because he thought he could forget about that. But now he had been reminded of it, and he felt awful. He wanted to know, what had been the point? The facilitator didn’t have an answer. Nor, having worked across theatre and homeless services for years now, do I.”

How Podcasts Are Democratizing Learning

“In a nation always on the go, it does seem as if the most serious intellectual production and consumption has been confined to the cloisters of higher education, where an elite professoriate soaks in high ideas in paneled seminar rooms safe from the hurly-burly of daily life. But what if a technology was able to bridge the gap, accommodating our culture’s hyperkinetic habits while also bringing to it gems of intellectual wealth from the ivory tower? To a large extent this is exactly what the best educational podcasts—which stress learning for the sake of learning—are doing.”

Making Poets – And Their Poetry – Accessible 24/7

After he got sober, poet Kaveh Akbar wanted to fill his world with something that wasn’t about narcotics – and that something was creating a poetry site where he posts deep, wide-ranging interviews with poets every other week. “Akbar jokes that if you’ve read a dozen DiveDapper interviews, you’ve spent an hour with a dozen different poets — and you’ve actually spent 12 hours with him too.”