Mark Harris writes about how audiences are finding current-day resonance in properties like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Americans, The Big Sick, and Dunkirk that were planned and written well before the 2016 election. However, “this moment is coming into focus just as it’s about to end. … With the advent of autumn we’ll move into a period in which most of the resonance will be planned. … My guess – speaking of questionable forecasting – is that our relationship to Trumpian pop-culture material will start to change in the next few months. Critics and audiences alike can be suspicious of art that looks like it wants to have an effect.”
Category: AUDIENCE
How Opera America Helped Spark A New Era In American Opera
“New music is a culture that tends to romanticize risk, and I think we ought to push back on that romanticizing. For all its aesthetic innovation, new music remains a job for many people.” Perhaps the same could be said of new American opera. Debates over its future highlight a complex web of expectations concerning not only the importance of radical artistic vision but also the commercial realities and conventional operatic norms of larger institutions that cannot afford to fail in the same way that smaller organizations might.
China Blacks Out Foreign Movies And Sees Home-Grown Movies Top The Box Office
China’s government, intent on building a domestic film industry to rival Hollywood’s, typically bans imported releases during peak moviegoing periods, such as national holidays and summer vacations. The blackouts — officially called “domestic film protection periods” — have historically given a summer bump to local films.
American Theatre Enthusiastically Takes On The Made-For-Theatre Trump
“With almost as much gusto as the talkers on cable news channels, the theater world is chewing over the bombastic image and pronouncements of President Trump, albeit with even less concern about the appearance of neutrality. It’s fair to say that among the lively arts, the theater has staked a claim most quickly and aggressively as a conduit for critiques of an administration that the vast majority of artists look upon as a threat.”
Study: Art Hung Higher Than Eye Level Is Rated Higher Quality
Those who looked up at the work “rated the painting most positively, while participants who looked down gave the lowest aesthetic appraisals,” the researchers report. “Eye-level presentations received judgments in between.”
New EU Regulations On Data Collection Will Impact How Arts Organizations Track Their Audiences
“People will be able to request details of the data held about them at any time, and can require its removal in a wide range of circumstances. This is not only fundraising data but information held about everyone in an arts organisation’s database, from audiences and artists to volunteers.”
German Philosophy Has Gone Mainstream And Popular. But Has It Sold Out?
German philosophy today is not so much the kind of intellectual discipline that Martin Heidegger would practice, hermitlike, in his Black Forest hut but rather a successful service industry competing for customers.
What We Learned About Fandom After Studying It For A Year
After a year of comprehensive and systematic research, we can safely say fandom is a relationship — a love relationship between the self and an object of fandom, whether that object is a show, movie, book, sport, team, league, band, genre, product, brand, person, activity, or idea. We actually refer to fandom as “love,” differentiating it from “liking something” by the loyalty, devotion, depth of interest, willingness to invest, and desire for closeness that it engenders. While at face value fandom may look unidirectional, reciprocity is underway nonetheless.
Are There Playwrights (Aside From Mamet) Who Actually *Do* Want To Hear From The Audience In Talkbacks?
Suzan-Lori Parks: “I love them because they are difficult. If they were easy I wouldn’t find them as delightful and delicious.”
How Did Rotten Tomatoes Become Both So Influential And So Feared?
It’s like Amazon or something even bigger (if there is such a thing): “As people are bombarded with more and more entertainment options, quality has become a determining factor for a movie’s success. And moviegoers use Rotten Tomatoes to select films the same way they turn to Yelp to determine what restaurants they visit.”