“Venture up the Amazon or into a Masai Mara village in Kenya, explore a jungle bazaar in southern India or even a roadside shop in Arizona selling Navajo knockoffs, and the chances are excellent that most of the beads you will see were produced in this unlikely mountain village a stone’s throw from the Polish frontier and a short drive to Germany.”
Tag: 01.13.16
Why Big Media Companies Should Be Worried About Netflix
“What if Netflix is the Amazon of the entertainment industry — the embodiment of a slow, expensive, high-risk effort to consume the entirety of your business?”
Al Jazeera America Is Shutting Down
“[Network] brass said the channel’s business model was ‘no longer sustainable'” and that the decision “was not a reflection of the quality of their work. Employees also were told that Al Jazeera will pursue a new global online strategy online with content delivered from the U.S. later this year.”
Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail
“But if Al Jazeera America’s brand was a handicap, its philosophy was a death sentence. The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, ‘unbiased’ hard news coverage. In other words, it made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy.”
Brian Bedford, 80, Stage Actor Who Thrilled In The Classics
“[He] trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, alongside such classmates as Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney. He never attained the cinematic stardom of those three, but he arguably exceeding their achievements by leaps and bounds in the theatre, an art to which he devoted the lion’s share of his efforts” – most notably at Canada’s Stratford Festival, where he spend four decades playing everyone from Macbeth to Tartuffe to Trigorin to Lady Bracknell.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.13.16
Arts funding and peer review
At The Scotsman, Euan McColm writes about the controversy surrounding Creative Scotland’s grant to artist Ellie Harrison, who will live in Glasgow for a year without leaving, in order to personally document what is known in social science as the ‘Glasgow effect’ … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-01-13
Reasons for moving
One of the challenges of connecting aesthetics and “beauty” to arts organizations is that aesthetics and reason work on different terms. We all know the “reasons” to do things as a cultural manager … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-01-13
The Tales They Tell
Big Dance Theater and Noche Flamenca dissect and reconnect narratives. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-01-13
My world, and welcome to it
On Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in the auditorium of Chicago’s Court Theatre, watching Charlie Newell reblock the final scene of his production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens there on Saturday. Midway through… … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-01-13
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An Unconventional Chilean Has Won This Year’s Pritzker Prize
“Compared with those so-called “starchitects,” and their principally aesthetic set of concerns, Alejandro Aravena couldn’t be geographically or conceptually farther away: He is young, at 48; and almost all of his projects are in his native Chile. And, he is best-known for scrappy but effective social-housing projects, in which he leaves room for residents to invest their own work and resources to alter his designs.”
Christopher Hawthorne Chats With Pritzker Winner Alejandro Aravena
“I think that we architects too much tend to create exhibitions where the problems we are dealing with only interest other architects. The jargon that we use and the words that we use, nobody understands except other architects. So I wanted the starting point to be far away from architecture, in problems and challenges that every single citizen would like to see improved.”
Actor David Margulies Dead At 78
“[He was] a versatile character actor who performed in scores of supporting stage, film and television roles but was most conspicuous as the common-sense mayor in Ghostbusters and as Tony Soprano’s sleazy lawyer.”
Britain’s Strapped Regional Museums Are Starting To Charge Admission
“More than one in 10 museums intend to introduce entry charges this year, in moves that underline the vulnerability of cultural organisations to cuts in local authority funding. Since 2010, when the government embarked on widespread cuts as part of its efforts to reduce the deficit, some 44 museums have closed.”