The Kennedy Center is mightily trying to remove its blinkers and open itself up to wider cultural influences — with, for instance, its new hip-hop arm. But it still defaults to a concept of “art” and “culture” that may not denote inclusivity to a lot of people.
Category: AUDIENCE
A Competition For Robot Artists – With $100K In Prize Money
Thirty-one teams from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia are competing in the 1st-Annual International RobotArt Competition. Votes from the public will help select the winner.
Germany’s Cult Of Trombone (They’re Everywhere)
“While membership in Germany’s Protestant (Lutheran) church is rapidly declining – last year a record 200,000 members left the church – its trombone choirs are thriving. Today, Germany has 110,000 amateur brass players belonging to 6,000 trombone choirs.”
This Week in Audience 04.24.16
Our roundup of stories chronicling evolution of thinking about the relationships between artists and audiences. Stories on why donors stop giving to the arts, how the physical world gets in the way of audiences used to the ease of clicks, and some skepticism about “diversity and democratization” in the arts.
The Internet Changes Everything, And Nothing
“Napoleon would be trapped in the amber of time, in a big glass case, if not for one thing: Access to information.”
How Did The Pulitzer Bump Fare This Year?
“The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen — which tells the story of a Vietnamese undercover communist agent in Los Angeles and the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Monday, and soon after began winning a very different kind of award: cold hard cash.”
When Algorithms Choose Your Music For You, Something Is Being Lost
“I do feel that if the great push of the smartest minds in this business is moving towards efficiency in curating for you, in delivering you what it knows you will like from the great abundance, well, something’s being lost, isn’t it? Isn’t the thing that’s being lost you and your efforts to figure out what you like and you respond to?”
Library Anxiety (Yes, It’s A Thing)
“That term is hardly a household name among students, but say it to a college librarian, and he or she will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. … ‘Why would anyone think we are intimidating?’ writes Michel C. Atlas. ‘What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?'”
Met’s Money Woes And MoMA’s Millions: Today’s Art World In Microcosm
“Modern and contemporary art dominate the action these days – in auction houses and galleries, as well as museums. Everyone wants in, including a revered institution like the Met, which is striving to play catch-up even as it is struggling to pay the bills.”
Democratize The Arts? Doesn’t Really Mean Much, Does It?
“If art and culture are to matter to more people, they must provide them with value. Much audience development work, however, seeks to provide people not with value but with values, because the ideological basis of audience development is the democratisation of culture.”