“Data from industry body UK Theatre has revealed that total box office income for member venues in 2016 was £470 million, up from £397 million in 2013. This was due to a 10% rise in average ticket price paid over the period, equivalent to a £2.15 increase per ticket, as well as improved ticket sales, fuller theatres and more productions.”
Tag: 11.30.17
The News Business Is Collapsing In Front Of Us
“Virtually every news organization in America has seen its audience decline (and in some cases crater) since the record numbers of last winter. Some blame the Google and Facebook algorithms (could real news getting caught up in the fight against the fake stuff?). Others speculate that readers and viewers are simply tiring of the 24/7 onslaught of crazy. Either way, declining audience equals declining advertising revenue, and we know what that means.”
Research: What Makes A Poem Stick Out?
Researchers speculate that evoking strong imagery may make the content of a poem easier to mentally process, and thus make the experience of reading it more enjoyable. Alternately, “readers might pay closer attention to poems that are vivid,” the researchers write.
Just How Many Damn Contemporary Art Museums Can Miami Take?
“More, more, more. Here, hardly a season goes by without the announcement of yet another new art museum or expansion – all fueled by the homegrown excitement and international attention surrounding the Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December, and all primarily focused on Basel-style contemporary art at the expense of virtually every other artistic milieu. Left behind is the math underlying this increasingly crowded landscape: Can Miami afford all of these art museums?”
Louvre In Talks To Show Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’
“Louvre President and Director Jean-Luc Martinez said that he hopes to secure a loan of the most expensive artwork ever sold for a blockbuster Leonardo show the museum is planning to mark the 30th anniversary of its ‘Grand Louvre’ renovation and expansion in late 2018.”
$450M Leonardo ‘Salvator Mundi’ May Have Had ‘Double-Bind Guarantee’ (What’s That?)
“To minimise its risk, the auction house found a third party willing to ‘guarantee’ the work. In other words, the painting was pre-sold to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed sum.” That third party was, according to one rumor, the owners of another work on sale at the same auction, Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers – which was, in turn, guaranteed by Dmitry Rybolovlev, seller of Salvator Mundi. Hence the “double-bind.”
Jim Nabors, TV’s Gomer Pyle, Dead At 87
“Gomer was a recognizable kind of American hero: a good-hearted, gentle, unsophisticated sort (not unlike Forrest Gump of a later era) who encounters a harder, more cynical modern world – in this case embodied by Southern California – and helps redeem it. … To fans who knew him only as Gomer, his full-throated, almost operatic baritone was surprisingly striking, if strangely incongruous.”
Description Of Male Organs As ‘Billiard Rack’ Wins Bad Sex In Fiction Award
Says the citation for Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers, “The judges felt that there are parts in the book where Bollen goes overboard in his attempts to describe the familiar in new terms, leading occasionally to confusion. In the line quoted … they were left unsure as to how many testicles the character in question has.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.30.17
Recent Listening: Urban Fado
Mary Ann McSweeney, Urban Fado (McSweeney)
In Lisbon, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Tokyo – among other places around the world – musicians are melding jazz and Fado. Fado’s origins in Portugal extend to at least … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-11-30
Welcome To The News Paywall 2.0
“The first time around, many paywalls simply did not work. But times have changed. The New York Times success in transforming itself into a company that is markedly less dependent on advertising than it has been in recent years has emboldened many other publishers. The Times now makes more than 20 percent of its revenue on digital-only subscriptions, a number which has been growing quickly. In absolute terms, last quarter, the Times made $85.7 million from these digital products. The question is: Can media organizations that are not huge like the Times or The Washington Post, or business focused like Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal, create meaningful businesses from their paywalls?”