Category: AUDIENCE

How Would You Explain Opera? Here’s One Attempt

One would think that in an era of immersive realities, opera would have tried to aim for higher levels of verisimilitude, would have become grittier and true to life, but in the age of cinema, the opposite happened. Twentieth-century opera became more amorphous, less plot-driven. Watch something like Nixon In China, with its listless, meandering scenes and droning, repetitive music, and you will start yearning for a king disguised as a peasant and a letter given to the wrong princess. Opera does not attempt real social commentary or naturalism well: it is a heightened reality, a dream. Opera is crazy and intense like dreaming, another heightened reality, and we often wake from dreams wishing we could enter them again.

The Real Problem With Making Good Movies Today Isn’t “Rotten Tomatoes.” It’s The Audiences Hollywood Is Trying To Capture

“The real problem is much bigger than Rotten Tomatoes—it’s that so much of Hollywood is now fixated on capturing the widest audience possible with every film. Blockbuster action movies, superhero franchises, jolty horror pictures, and animated family films that can draw large crowds are the order of the day. Even mother!, which was light on actual scares but heavy on mood and allegory, was marketed as a horror movie in an attempt to pull viewers; theatergoers who felt misled by the advertising may have contributed to the F CinemaScore rating.”

Lauren Gunderson Is America’s Most-Produced Playwright This Season. So Why Don’t You Know About Her?

“Her plays are staged almost twice as often as anyone else’s on the list, far ahead of venerated figures like Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson, who edged her for the top spot last year. (The survey excludes Shakespeare, America’s perennial favorite.) Although men still write three-quarters of the plays that get produced, Gunderson has built a national reputation with works that center on women’s stories. And, though most playwrights also teach or work in television, she has managed to make a living, in San Francisco, by writing for the stage.”

Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra Loses 20% Of Subscribers As It Moves To Temporary Venue

While the Tonhalle itself undergoes a major renovation, “the exiled orchestra can be seen in action for the next three years at the Maag Hall, part of an industrial complex in Zurich West … CHF10 million has been invested in the acoustics, but there are 300 fewer seats than in the Tonhalle, and one in five orchestra subscriptions has been cancelled.”

The Bilbao Effect – 20 Years Later

“For all its fame, there are many who ask if so-called the “Bilbao effect” is real, and if so, if it is easily repeatable. Was the Guggenheim Bilbao a unique combination of a project at the right time and in the right place—a great architect and daring museum combined with an unusually forward-looking regional government willing to invest? Have the reasons for its transformative effect been misunderstood, explaining why its model has been frequently imitated but its extraordinary success rarely replicated?”

The 10 Best Places In DC To Sit And Really Enjoy Art

“Sitting down, in a museum, can be an almost radical act: a refusal to flow along with the distracted crowd, idly passing by art as if it was just one more stream of visual enticement in a visually saturated world. A good sit is all about committing to the depth, not the breadth, of the art itself, seeing more by deciding to see less.” Philip Kennicott picks the finest spots in greater Washington to do just that.

Have Our Senses Been Polluted?

“I don’t mean to depict our sensorium — the entire range and capacity of our sensory experience — as a pure state that has been defiled by light, noise, flavor and scent pollution; that would just be another version of the original-sin-and-fall narrative. I would argue rather that we have managed to turn the senses against themselves by pitting overwhelming light against lights, overpowering sound against sounds, intense flavor against flavors, penetrating aroma against aromas. In each case, the result is a marked simplification in the field of possible experiences — one or two stimuli will outshine, outsmell or outshout the rest.”

What Newspapers Sacrifice When They Get Rid Of Their Arts Critics

Peter Preston, who was editor of The Guardian for 20 years (1975-95): “If a film critic, say, has real value, then it’s in the build-up of recognition and trust between them and the reader. Week by week, you share the critic’s views and check them against your own cinema-going experience. … [Critics’] eye on the arts, day by day and week by week, adds richness and information to the mix. They have the possibility of authority that blogs or compilations in the Rotten Tomatoes style lack.”