Are we comfortable letting shareholder-driven companies - any private company - have absolute control over infrastructure that is increasingly essential for the functioning of civil society?…
A flood of stories this week show how TV is dying and video is on the rise. You think changing audience behavior is tough on arts organizations? Try it when you’re a multi-billion-doll…
A piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times this weekend delves into our fascination with Big Data. The tech industry has made so many billions of dollars being able to track, quanti…
Three stories this week get to the heart of the question. First, the BBC polled critics worldwide and asked them what were the best 100 movies made so far in the 21st Century. Look at the li…
This Week: Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns… Has the audience deserted blockbuster movies?… The best new beautiful library of 2016… Is it a good idea to pay you…
In this week’s AJ highlights I included some of the stories we found about the naked Donald Trump statues that appeared in five American cities last week. One reader was unhappy: Vile …
Driverless cars are here and they work and by all accounts they make driving safer than when humans are piloting. So why aren’t they already in showrooms? Not so fast. It’s not j…
Dance is the most physical art. Bodies moving, yes, but physical also because of how bodies relate to the spaces they’re in. Much of the energy in tech innovation right now is explo…
Last week the Brooklyn artist space National Sawdust announced it had hired away Steve Smith from the Boston Globe to start an ambitious new culture journal. Smith is a former NYTimeser, …
This Week: An artist collective skewers Trump… How Florence’s Uffizi is dramatically addressing its problems… Our fetishizing of “authenticity” doesn’t ri…
One of the biggest comforts of fast food is its familiarity. Generic from location to location, you know not only what the food will be and how it will taste, but that the ritual of the expe…
This Week: Is the music industry’s piracy war really about higher royalty payments?… There are signs the Golden Age of TV might be ending… Theatre’s emotional toll…
It’s a more difficult question than you might think. There’s a maxim in the education world that only subjects that are tested are funded. Thus the imperative for arts education …
This Week: The ways in which we experience art are about to change in big ways… Auction houses are becoming shadow banks for the super-wealthy with money to stash… The Met Museum…
Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festival and we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to a few …
Over on Slate this week Brian Wise posted a piece about Donald Trump and his playing of Puccini’s Nussun Dorma at campaign events. Trump had been using a recording of Pavarotti singing…
Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don’t happen if they don’t have money to be produced, but – as evidenced at…
A 2015 survey by blogger Mae Mai reported that 260 new opera companies started since 2000 in the United States. There are 80 opera companies now working in New York alone. Over the pas…
As the digital world pummels us with more information and choice, many of us react by walling off the things we simply won’t pay attention to. It’s a survival strategy. We increa…
This Week: In an age of artists what is the definition of being an artist?… Canadian study says arts workers are most at risk… What is R&D in the arts?… Edinburgh Festi…
This week: How did our culture get to the point we don’t trust facts?… Are artists actually detrimental to neighborhoods?… Our notions of “greatness” need an ov…
This week: A penetrating portrait of artist Chuck Close, a reality check on meritocracy as a concept, a look at anger and our access to visceral emotion in a media-saturated world, the endur…
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, several French artists were asked to design a series of cards that would imagine what life would be like 100 years in the future in the year 2000. T…
This week: What ethical responsibilities do funders and funded have to one another?… The gatekeeper problem is still a thing in the internet age… What should the measure of su…
This week: Alas, hard work probably doesn’t trump innate ability… It’s tempting to believe extravagant claims for technology, but there are limits… Yes, by all means …