This Week: Do you own the culture you just bought?… How did TV become the medium for complexity?… Should we keep audiences in the dark about what they’ll see?… Measuring the effectiveness of arts policy is really hard… Technology is changing the ways we experience the world.
Category: AUDIENCE
Netflix Is Coming (Harder) For Movie Theatres, And Some Chains Are Furious
“Under the terms of this 10-picture deal [with iPic Entertainment], the luxury theater chain will screen original Netflix films in its 15 upscale theaters in cities including Los Angeles and New York.”
We’re Just Getting Started On Questions About Virtual Reality And Relationships
“If you’ve gone through great effort to be closer to someone, and you have plenty of space for other solitary pursuits, sometimes the most valuable things are the ones that anchor you to reality.”
Artists And Anonymity. There Are Problems
“It is interesting that writers cannot “reasonably expect” to keep their names unpublished, given how many have down the years. Daniel Defoe published as Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift as Lemuel Gulliver (with phoney portrait). Aphra Behn published pseudonymously. So did Henry Fielding. Samuel Richardson was anonymous and Jane Austen was just “a Lady”. Horace Walpole, all three Brontës and George Eliot all had noms de plume, and Eliot’s stuck. Even today, the famously anonymous are everywhere you look.”
Verbal Complexity Was Considered Elitist. So How Did TV Become The Place Where It Flourishes?
“We live in an epoch in which the battle for the complex and the resistant seems (“seems” is the operative word, as it often is) to have been lost. One of its early casualties was prose style. Style is not just a writer’s personal signature; and yet “classic style” is an oxymoron, because style is essentially idiosyncratic.”
On-Demand Culture Means You Don’t Own That Book, Movie Or Song You Think You Just Bought
“With the move to cloud computing and streaming content, the concept of “copy ownership” is now disappearing from entertainment as well. Software, motion pictures, and even music are increasingly a service provided to you. Streaming services and cloud content have their own worries. For example, what happens when you’re traveling somewhere with no reliable internet access? What happens when the service provider’s servers go down for days and you are paying for a service you are not getting? But the problems run deeper. The loss of ownership sends copyright law out to sea.”
Creating Online Rituals For Our Online Lives
“There is a reason that ritual is such a pervasive part of human experience that it appears in every culture, and dissected by a wide range of disciplines. … [They’re] ‘the symbolic codes for interpreting and negotiating events of everyday existence.’ In the absence of online rituals, we lack the signposts that can help us navigate difficult online experiences – or mark and appreciate the great ones. Rather than wait for rituals to gradually and organically emerge out of online life, it’s time for us to think about consciously creating [them].”
Can Audiences Enjoy New Dance Pieces More If They Know *Nothing* About Them In Advance?
“The idea goes against the grain in arts marketing, as venues increasingly provide preview trailers, rehearsal clips and artist interviews for audiences to watch in advance.” But London’s Dance Umbrella festival is giving it a try. “A lack of knowledge about the art form can stop audiences from coming to dance, so [festival director Emma] Gladstone wanted to free them from worrying about what they didn’t know.”
How Natural History Museums Got Hijacked For Kids. Time To Give ‘Em Back To Adults
“Museums were originally meant to be places of inspiration, literally the ‘seat of the Muses’. In our 21st-century interpretation, however, we expect them to function as providers of kid-oriented entertainment more than anything else.”
In Praise Of Shorter Performances – And Even Abridging The Text
“Terence Rattigan, England’s master of the well-made play, predicted back in the ’50s that younger playgoers conditioned by movies and TV would eventually start to chafe at the three-hour-two-intermission running time that was then the theatrical norm.” Terry Teachout praises the trend toward shorter, no-intermission plays, and suggests that we should feel free to make cuts in longer works by the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Richard Wagner.