Phil Kennicott: “It will say to donors — who should take note and respond appropriately — that the Met no longer intends to be the country’s de facto national art museum. By sheer size and visitor numbers, it may remain the most prominent art museum in the country. But it now distinguishes between a local public — those who live in New York — and the rest of the country, which it treats merely as clients. It cannot reasonably approach major donors, those with art they want to leave in the public trust and those with money who hope to support access to that art, and say: We are the nation’s museum.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Met Museum’s New Admission Policy Speaks To Much Bigger Problems
Jerry Saltz: “I do not begrudge the Met for trying to do whatever it can to maintain its preeminence. Yet this first-time attempt to raise admission before its new director arrives — intended to raise $6 million to $10 million annually — doesn’t entirely pass the smell test. It has an air of expediency, nervousness, an idea drought, of managers rather than art being in charge. Especially since the museum just spent more than $65 million on the space-eating, flow-disrupting, patron-inscribed fountains in the newly renamed Koch Plaza. This single act of philanthropy (Vegas fountains and all) would have covered almost ten years of this iffy admissions policy.”
New Director Of Shakespeare’s Globe To Let Cast Pick Roles And Audiences Choose Plays
“Saying she wants to dismantle theatre hierarchies, Michelle Terry announced [that] … none of the actors turning up for rehearsals [for Hamlet and As You Like It] will know which role they are taking, with the whole ensemble choosing who plays whom. In a similar vein, when the plays The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night go on tour, some audiences will be able to choose which one they want to see that night.”
Met Museum Now Will Require Non-NYC Residents To Pay Admission
The change reflects the Met’s efforts to establish a reliable, annual revenue stream after a period of financial turbulence and leadership turmoil, particularly given what the Met describes as a sharp decline in people willing to pay the current “suggested” admission price, also $25. But the move could provoke objections from suburbanites and tourists as well as outcry from those who believe a taxpayer funded institution should be free to the public.
Critics: Met Museum’s New Admission Policy Is A Mistake
“I worry that the Met’s plan is classist, and nativist. It divides people into categories — rich and poor, native and foreign — which is exactly what this country does not need right now. I think this is tied to the abstract way wealth is accrued these days. In the last Gilded Age the rich had a much more literal sense of the suffering their fortunes were built on and a greater need to give back.”
Broadway Makes Itself More Accessible To The Outside World
As producers realize there is both aptitude among these performers and dollars to be spent, performers and audience members with disabilities have seen a small growth of increased accessibility among New York’s highbrow theater arts.
Study: Today’s Students Pursue Perfectionism More Than Previous Generations
“Today’s young people are competing with each other in order to meet societal pressures to succeed, and they feel perfectionism is necessary in order to feel safe, socially connected, and of worth.”
How Facebook Plans To Start Competing With YouTube (But Not Netflix)
Facebook VP of product Fidji Simo: “When we look at the content that’s really building these engaged communities, it’s content from creators that are vlogging for 15 minutes. … We see incredibly engaged communities around knitting. That’s something that won’t build a massive community like a big TV show, but if you do that for everyone’s passion projects and you can connect everyone to the creator, it can be extremely powerful.”
Young People Value Theatre As Much As Older Ones, Though They Do So Differently, Researchers Find
Theatre management professor Anthony Rhine looks as the results of three recent studies on engagement.
Will Technology Reinvent The Book? Nope, And Here’s Why
“Yes, the written word has been in decline since the advent of film and then television, though recent technological change has undoubtedly hastened its fall. But this has led many to assume that the problem is one of form, that if the book could adapt to our multi-screen age, its cultural retreat would end. This optimistically assumes that the decline is reversible, which it isn’t. Books were overtaken by other media decades ago. The problem isn’t that books don’t have enough television in them, or enough internet in them; it’s that they are just one form of readily available cultural consumption among so many.”