Category: TOP STORIES

When an arts center stumbles over its definition of inclusivity. Arts as a bridge between cultures? Lessons from mega-culture projects. The mega-gallery mogul. And a dogged poet who spent decades trying to get her work in The New Yorker.

This week: Do the Met Museum’s financial woes say anything about today’s museum business? Who wants to see art in mobbed museums anyway? Prince’s career as a control freak. A realignment of power in cities. And diversity as fetish object.

This week, a groundbreaking deal for Broadway actors and dancers, James Levine finally decides to retire from the Met Opera, a debacle at the National Ballet of Romania that quickly escalated to involve the country’s Prime Minister, a warning about fetishizing “creativity” as the key to success, and a cautionary question about what machine intelligence might look like.

What business success in theatre looks like, our over-obsession with creativity as a catch-all answer to success, how the art markets really work, how taste gets confused with pretension, and machines’ inroads to art.

A number of stories this week tackled the meaning of greatness in art (even if they didn’t explicitly frame it that way). A changing culture requires changing definitions of greatness, but defining “great” has often been problematic.

This week’s best reads oddly hover around existential questions. What arts organizations should exist? Does truth exist? Can theatre really change anything, and should it even try? Canada’s new government makes a big existential bet on the arts. And do our tools define art?

How do the arts transition to the future without sacrificing the past? Has technology become “culture” rather than soft/hard-ware? Where did we get the idea that art is supposed to comfort? Will we be able watch new movies at home when they open in theatres? And should our museums be more moral?

New York gets its first new major museum in decades. English National Opera continues its slow-motion implosion. The relationship between art and critics frays. Some counter-intuitive findings about creativity from scientists. And some cultural industries that are booming.

Arguably, the dominant cultural issue of our time is the changes in how people are finding and getting culture. In response, business models supporting culture and the kinds of culture being made are also changing. It also underpins debates about diversity, engagement and power. Some broad themes this week.