Doomed Orchestra Has Actually Saved Itself With Crowdfunding

The Danish National Chamber Orchestra was disbanded at New Year’s, after “this 75-year-old ensemble’s state funding was cancelled at ludicrously short notice … Through a Kickstarter campaign to raise 3m Danish kroner (£300,000), the orchestra received more than a third of that money from supporters, and have now had pledges for the rest of the balance from the Danish business community.”

Is There TOO Much Arts Journalism?

It’s uncomfortable to think that more arts writing is creating less substantive engagement with the arts, but the arts are not the only field wrestling with this issue. As Alice Robb reported (ironically, in The New Republic, last September), “Science has never been so democratic. It’s just not clear whether democracy is what science needs.” There may be no correlation between current arts participation numbers and the increase in arts journalism, but arts journalism played a significant role in audience development during the 20th century.

The Museum Of The Future Is Here (And It’s On Fifth Avenue)

“The Cooper Hewitt has transformed into an organization not unlike Wikipedia, Pinterest, or, for that matter, The Atlantic: Somewhere between a media and a tech firm, it is a Thing That Puts Stuff on the Internet. Or, more precisely, A Thing That Puts Things on the Internet. But to get to that point, the museum [and its leaders] … have ultimately had to shift their understanding of what a thing is in the first place.”