On the eve of FringeNYC, which runs Friday to Aug. 30, we asked representatives from some shows presented last year whether the overall effort — the cost, the frantic pace, the heat and the need to compete for audiences with almost 200 other shows — is ultimately worth it.
Tag: 08.13.15
What HBO Acquiring “Sesame Street” Means For The Future Of TV
“Sesame Street will still air on PBS—after a nine-month delay—so it’s not as if the program is vanishing entirely behind a paywall. But today’s announcement is a harbinger. The streaming model won’t just be for re-runs and specialized content. It’s coming for all of us.”
Research: Children’s Educational TV Doesn’t Reduce Prejudice
“Despite our vigorous attempts to unearth associations between children’s racial attitudes and their exposure to these types of programs, there were no significant direct effects of exposure to intergroup friendship shows such as Sesame Street, and minority hero shows such as Dora the Explorer,” the researchers write in the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
‘Sesame Street’ Goes To HBO And Makes Clear Why We Should Fund The Arts
The new agreement “simultaneously demonstrates, once again, that the show is a valuable commodity, and makes one of the best, most underlooked arguments for public arts funding. It’s not … about whether art exists or not. It’s about whether people who don’t live in areas with museums, or who can’t afford cable, much less premium cable subscriptions, have access to arts and culture.”
Rupert Pennefather Leaves Royal Ballet, Effective Immediately
Neither the company nor Pennefather gave any reason for the departure. He had danced with the company for 16 years and was named a principal in 2008.
It Can Pay For Itself : Arts Council England Defends Decision Not To Fund Comedy
“An open letter written by the producers of the London Sketch Comedy Festival criticised ACE’s policy not to financially support the art form, claiming it is ‘negligent and dismissive’. A spokeswoman for ACE said the main reason it does not fund comedy directly is that it ‘tends to be a commercially self-sustaining performance form’.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.13.15
Reading the Tea Leaves: What is Ai Weiwei Thinking?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-08-13
Weekend Listening Tip: Jazz Port Townsend All-Stars
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-08-12
So you want to see a show?
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-08-13
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New Opera’s Acceptance Problem
“Why do we have to work so hard to love new American opera? Part of the problem is that even those who love opera tend to think of it these days as a problem child: an acquired taste, a genre that has to work hard to win people over, an art form for which one must make allowances. Some try to conceal it as something other than it is, downplaying the word “opera” on marketing materials about works adapted from familiar books and/or films: they’ll like it, the reasoning goes, if only we can get them in.”
Why Old-Media Companies Are Buying New-Media Sites
“What these new-media entities need most is money (and perhaps a bit of old-media prestige). Comcast has plenty of that, thanks to its cable TV, ISP, and movie businesses. Getting that cash also gives Vox and Buzzfeed a broader reach—and it allows them to brag about being “unicorns” for passing the $1 billion mark. So what does Comcast/NBCUniversal get out of these kinds of deals? For the most part, it means they get a hedge against the future.”
Chinese Ripoff Of Anish Kapoor’s “Bean” Sculpture Raises Ire And Questions
“The sculpture in the town of Karamay and the outrage about it raises fascinating questions. Why would a city in China think it could just knock up a copy of a living artist’s work without permission? Is this a malign act, or a magnificently naive one? Do people in the west make too much of the rights of the individual author?”