David Devan, Opera Philadelphia: “I think it’s raised the game in terms of people’s aesthetic and performance expectations. If you can go to a movie theater and hear a great singer with a great orchestra with a gazillion-dollar set, that raises the bar for everybody. It did help me raise money to improve the quality of what we put on in the Academy [of Music]. This isn’t about my ego; this is about the necessity of doing work that people will come to. That means there’s a higher standard of care that we must meet.”
Category: AUDIENCE
Google Rolls Out New Museum App That Lets You Explore The World’s Great Museums
Click “Visit” on a museum’s page to get opening times, find out what’s on that day and navigate there in one click. We’ve also been experimenting with a new feature. The Art Recognizer is now available in London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Just pull up the app, point your phone’s camera to a painting on display and find all the information you want to know about the artwork. We’re planning to roll this out to museums around the world—so stay tuned.
Fur Will Be Flying: ‘Cats’ Is Back On Broadway, And, Well, Not Everyone Is Happy About It
“Who wants Cats again? I posed the question to people of all stripes and have come to realize that the question is itself a theatrical acid test: It gives way to passionate replies on both sides. No one seems indifferent.”
Crime In Most Of The US Is Way Down – Here’s Why So Many Americans Are Still So Fearful Of It
“According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans think that the crime rate is increasing, up from 63 percent in 2013. But the reality is that America is getting safer. The national crime rate is about half of what it was at the peak in 1991. … Nnow that crime rates are so low, people have ‘very little direct experience of crime,’ so their perceptions are mainly shaped by news media and entertainment.”
Too Cute: The Rise And Fall, Or At Least Leveling, Of Kawaii In Japan
Neil Steinberg looks at how the concept of kawaii arose in Japanese culture, why it works, how it became so prevalent that Japanese cities have officially promoted cute mascots, and what happens when some parts of the culture have had enough of the likes of Hello Kitty.
San Francisco Symphony Cuts Back On Community Outreach Projects
“The SFS Board of Directors is said to have voted to discontinue the Community of Music Makers (CoMM) at least temporarily, and make a deep cut in the Instrument Training and Support (IT&S) program for middle and high schools in San Francisco.”
A History Of Interpreting Blackness To White Audiences
“So much black intellectual energy has been expended on convincing white audiences simply to care about the exploitation of the black poor and the alienation of the black middle classes. The receptivity of particular white audiences has fluctuated over time, and with it—in tandem, arguably—various indicators of racial inequality. Perhaps just as pressing, then, as interpreting blackness for white audiences is interpreting the causes and consequences of white attention for the rest of us.”
Music Producers Need To Make Existential Shift In How They Think About Selling Music
“To take an academic look at music marketing, the traditional ‘sale’ was usually somewhere near the end of a customer experience journey: awareness, discovery, interest, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation, and advocacy. Now we have a situation where the ‘play’ is conceivably part of every step. So thinking holistically, if we view ‘experience’ as the product of a record label now, we need a way to measure it effectively, and that’s why it feels like there is a data ‘arms race’ going on at the moment.”
Why Collective Movement (Dancing?) Brings Us Together
Evidence suggests that synchronising movement with others leads to feelings of togetherness or ‘oneness’ – perhaps because the intentional act of coordinating with another person necessitates sharing mental states. To row a boat down the river, the individual ‘I’ must become the collective ‘we’.
Why Big Publishing’s Blockbuster Mentality Is Good For Indie Presses And Good For American Literature
“When editors and publishers feel they need to fight for every moment of planned reading, and readers are experiencing a shrinking cultural attention span, it’s surprising that large books inherently make the most market sense. With this pattern of investment behavior, major presses are inadvertently helping foster an environment where American indie presses can thrive by doing the very thing they’re best at: being small and, by extension, focusing on creativity and originality over sales.”