It’s not about money. It’s about the senses. “As an empirical matter, reading on a tablet cannot remotely approach the sensual literary experience offered by an old-fashioned book. The latter is, I’d venture, intrinsically more pleasurable than the former, not unlike the intrinsic difference between high quality toilet paper and the sandpaper stuff used in bus stations.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Absurdist Theatre Serves The Resistance To Any Regime
After the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, absurd theatre fell out of fashion. Then came 9/11. “Absurdism is about facing a world in which nothing seems to make sense. It is about accepting that deeply tragic events happen sometimes without much or any warning. It is about the realization that our understanding of the universe is limited and flawed. It is about the embracing the fact that our lives can be both terrifying and ridiculous, indeed the more terrifying, the more ridiculous. And it is about resistance.”
A Year Out Of Bankruptcy, Philly’s Please Touch Museum Has A Revamped Mission
Per a strategic plan developed with Michael Kaiser, “We will feel a little less like Disney and a little more like a place where children are really exploring all the wonderful things that will make them want to be learners the rest of their lives,” says the Please Touch CEO.
‘By All Accounts A World First: Nude Dancers In Front Of Nude Paintings Before A Nude Audience’
Sydney Dance Company and the Art Gallery of New South Wales created a show for which Rafael Bonachela choreographed dances to be performed alongside such artworks as Rodin’s The Kiss and Francis Bacon triptych. Then they took the slowest-selling performance and branded it nude-audience-only; tickets sold out that day. Kate Hennessy went, and she writes about her experience there – as an art-lover and as a female.
Holocaust Museum In Illinois Tries Rock ‘N’ Roll To Pull In The Crowd
“Located … in Skokie, about 20 miles northwest of the Loop, the [Illinois] Holocaust Museum is not exactly on Chicago tourism’s well-worn path. Yet it’s the third-largest of its kind in the world.” Says the museums VP of marketing, “We’re trying to move people from ‘something I’ve been meaning to do’ and always give them a reason to go.” And yes, the exhibit in question does have a Holocaust connection.
How Does’ LA’s Largest Theatre Become More Diverse?
“We’ve talked about the idea of ‘radical hospitality. You meet people in their neighborhoods, in places where they’re already hanging out. Start with stories they know, things they’re familiar with.”
E-Book Sales Are Falling
“Nielsen found that e-book unit sales from reporting publishers were down 16% in 2016 from 2015. Units fell the most in the juvenile fiction segment, where e-book sales dropped 28% in the year and accounted for 10% of total category unit sales in 2016, down from 14%. (E-books have never been a big factor in juvenile nonfiction and accounted for 1% of units sold in 2016.)”
Selfies As Gallery Art? Really? It Was Inevitable
“In many ways, the selfie represents the epitome of contemporary culture’s transition into a highly-digitalised and technologically-advanced age as mobile-phone technology has caught up with the camera.”
Dozens Of London Live Music Venues Have Closed In The Past Decade. But What About Those That Are Thriving?
“You create a green scene of local bands who breed. They become fond of the venue because you give them support and, even if they grow, they’ll come back and play smaller shows here.”
Netflix Is Adding Subscribers At A Record Pace. And Investing Billions More In Original Shows
“In 2016, Netflix spent $5 billion on original programming. Five of the 10 shows people searched for most often last year are Netflix originals, company officials said, citing Google data during an earnings call. Eager to build on that, Netflix plans to spend $6 billion creating 1000 hours of new content this year, more than doubling its 2016 lineup.”