326 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
Arguably, the dominant cultural issue of our time is the changes in how people are finding and getting culture. Â In response, business models supporting culture and the kinds of culture b…
1. Is Funding Really The Top Issue In The Arts? Doug Borwick says no. “Insufficiency of funds will never go away. It's a state of being in the nonprofit sector. Overfocus on this a…
Anyone you know like ads? No. They’re the cackling crows getting between you and what you’re after. They’re uninvited, unwelcome, and we do whatever we can to swat them awa…
Adam Grant, in his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World writes about the necessity of anchoring new ideas in familiar things. To generate creative ideas, it's import…
1. This week in What-Does-The-Audience-Want? Cheaper tickets, for sure. Or at least the opportunity to pay what they want. Â One theatre converted its season to pay-as-you-want and saw a 5…
Ah, an old-fashioned press-banning. Feels like the good old days. Of the 162 stories we collected this week, a few memes emerged: It was the week of artistic directors in dance. First,…
Last week we conducted our first ArtsJournal poll, asking: What’s the biggest challenge facing the arts? We had 3,191 votes, with the largest percentage – 37% – answering f…
A new music director at the New York Phil. Some things we're learning about audiences. Some ways of analyzing writing. And the police who mistake a man singing opera for urgent screaming.
C-NET came away from this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas pronouncing that virtual reality is going to displace traditional porn. No surprise that the porn industry lead…
Welcome to our weekly “best of” ArtsJournal. These aren’t necessarily the most important of the 156 stories we found this week, but these particularly caught our eye. Your …
As inconsistent and distracted a blogger as I am, I am hardly a great blogger. But as someone who runs a network of arts blogs, I do have some observations. Great bloggers don’t just g…
One weekend last November, the biggest box-office at movie theatres throughout the UK wasn’t for the latest Hollywood blockbuster (the latest “Hunger Games” movie opened th…
A survey of dancers in the UK last summer reported that “more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5,000 a year from their performance work.” That’s …
We’re aggregating upwards of 150 stories a week on ArtsJournal these days. Despite the decimation of the daily newspaper arts journalism profession, there are more good stories about t…
Remember when the internet came along and everyone wondered whether there would still be a use for libraries? Oddly, just as the question was being called, in the early 2000s there was a bui…
Maybe it’s obvious, but in the for-profit world, making money is the point; profit defines success. In the non-profit world, the relationship between profit and success is more complic…
Recently, an orchestra manager told me that his orchestra was going to be “the most innovative orchestra in the world.” I asked what he was doing that was so innovative, and he r…
What does it mean to “engage with an audience”? It’s a fundamental question for anyone who makes anything. Whether it’s a political party trying to win votes, Coke tr…
“The rules of engagement in theatre have changed, and now audience participation is everywhere. But artists have a responsibility to take care of those they pick on.”
“Once settled in your seat, I suspect the first thing you'd notice would be the unusual ethnic and racial diversity onstage.”
“The fringe broke the 2 million barrier for the second year in a row, recording a rise of 5.24% on last year’s figures to 2,298,080, on an increase in productions of 3.79% to 3,3…
“I'm not trying to tell you the sky is falling . . . I'm here to say that what goes up, must come down (or in our case, go flat), and the more we know and understand when these things …
"If a single company gets scared and it is willing to pull work that it has invested time and money and love into… that is a very dangerous precedent."
The ten plays " five full-length and five one-act works " were discovered by producer Julius Green while researching a book about the author's work in theatre. He heralded the find as a "for…
“Assassination Theater, now in a run at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, is a provocative multimedia history lesson dressed up as a docudrama. An engrossing, rapid-fire exposé …
