“It pays to remember that moviegoing is a social activity for vastly more people than it is a kind of religious experience, and that the respect you and I may feel ought to be accorded to the art on screen is by no means the same for most. If you think of a movie as nothing more than a diversion, why should you mind if your attention is diverted for a moment somewhere else?”
Category: AUDIENCE
The British Plan To Keep Real Hamilton Tickets In The Hands Of Their Actual Human Purchasers
Basically, it’s an experiment: “Those buying tickets for Hamilton – one of the most highly anticipated shows of 2017 – will only receive a hard copy of their ticket when they arrive at the Victoria Palace Theatre.”
Making TV Reflect Its Audience, And Holding It Accountable When It Doesn’t
Maureen Ryan, chief TV critic for Variety: “I really take my hat off to men and women of color and women who actually fight these tropes in the room because every time you open your mouth for whatever reason to contradict the showrunner, you’re taking your career in your hands.”
The Demise Of Reading Has Been Greatly Exaggerated, Gallup Says
Sure, 16% of the people polled read no books in the past year, but the numbers of people reading is barely down from 2002, before smartphones, Twitter and Facebook.
Thanks, Harry Potter (And Girl On The Train), For Saving British Book Sales Once Again
“Nielsen BookScan reports that a total of £83.3m worth of print books were sold in the run-up to Christmas, which marks the highest since 2007.” Perhaps not entirely coincidental that the (previously) final Harry Potter book was published in … 2007.
Amazon’s ‘No Cashier’ Bookstore Has Humans Watching From Behind The Scenes
Sure, you can just pick up stuff – sandwiches, drinks, er, books – and walk out, as long as you have the app. And the store is supposed to “see” what you picked up. But sometimes it can’t, so “Amazon staff is asked to help out when the system used in the new Amazon Go store can’t make a determination.”
How To Incite – And Deal With – Youth Audience Rebellion In The Theatre
Should playwrights be making theatre that caters to twentysomethings? Or should theatres simply spend more time putting any play they do in context? Or is this all pandering? “We don’t want to create a nation of inactive blobs who passively sit by; we want to create a community of activists who, when they see someone being victimized, jump up and speak out.”
Smithsonian Visitors Top 30 Million In 2016, Thanks To Reopened Renwick And New Museum Of African American History
But despite the great numbers – the best total since 2012 – the numbers for visits to about half of the Smithsonian Museums were down from 2015.
Pop Culture Gets Metaphysical
“Across popular entertainment lately, science fiction, theoretical physics, and spirituality have blended to offer not escapism but wait-there’s-more-ism, offering a tantalizing hint that our perception of reality is too narrow – and that with a little bit of effort, we can see extraordinary things.”
Louvre Attendance Down By Over 20% In Past Two Years
As recently as 2014, Paris’s flagship museum had a record 9.3 million visitors – and those numbers were projected to rise to 12 million by 2025. Then came the terrorist attacks.