Category: AJBlogs

No one had any idea if people would tune in to all this arts content when the digital floodgates opened in March. Now arts organizations are reporting massive increases in online audiences driven by viewers and participants who have never set foot inside their buildings. – Hannah Grannemann

“Battle Instructions is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary in 1960 at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower denouncing and exposing moguls, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-20th century.” – Jan Herman

While the persistent lag in hiring minorities is arguably a manifestation of museums’ systemic racism, it is also a “pipeline problem” — the relative scarcity of well-trained minority candidates. But if a museum official were to state this publicly, it would likely be dismissed as a cop-out. – Lee Rosenbaum

“Orchestras are better than ever” – if you mean that, literally, you mean that in terms of the role the institution plays in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Boston, it has a bigger and more important role than it’s ever had in the past. Anybody who says that – they don’t know what an orchestra is. So this is a dangerous thing to tell young musicians. – Joseph Horowitz

Bach isn’t exactly the kind of composer for which Lang Lang became famous. In fact, he’s known the Goldbergs for a long time now, and the piece fits him better than you might expect. – David Patrick Stearns

One of the primary benefits of this pandemic is that artists and arts organizations were all forced to experiment – even though they didn’t feel ready. This wide-spread spirit of experimentation is itself an achievement. I don’t care that it took a collective “spaghetti at the wall” approach; we really needed a shakeup. – Hannah Grannemann

My goal as guest editor of Lynne Conner’s blog for the next six months is to share and respond to what I’m seeing happening during this crisis through the lens of the audience. Every day there are new ideas, plans, calls to action, reasons to despair and reasons to celebrate. In this space I will be sharing and responding to what I’m seeing – and I ask you to share and respond as well. – Hannah Grannemann

Either Max Hollein and Daniel Weiss, the director and president of the Metropolitan Museum, were knowing participants in Yoko Ono’s mischievous potshot at their august institution, or they fell for her prank. – Lee Rosenbaum

We need a significant, stable ongoing source of new funding for the arts that is politically insulated, inflation-proof, and expands the definitions of non-and for-profit arts. – Douglas McLennan

As New York City’s major museums prepare to reopen, the experience of the the first major U.S. art museum out of the re-starting gate — the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which intrepidly invited its public back three months ago — is an object lesson on how it might (or might not) work for others. – Lee Rosenbaum