This Week’s Highlights:
The Boston Symphony has been “living on borrowed time” for years, says Keith Lockhart (Boston Globe). The Jungle Theater in Minneapolis has put its building up for sale (Star Tribune). London’s National Gallery — in such precarious shape it has just hired an economist-in-residence — warns that “if they catch cold, the rest of us will get pneumonia” (Financial Times). Boston’s forward-thinking progressive mayor wants to cut the city arts budget by 27% (Boston Art Review). Hampshire College is selling off its campus to retire $25 million in debt (MassLive).
Wealthy amateurs are paying to “conduct” professional orchestras for an evening (The Baffler). San Francisco has named its first arts and culture czar with authority over three city agencies (SF Chronicle). Oxford has opened a billion-dollar humanities complex (The Guardian). The Guardian’s reader-funded American newsroom now has more U.S. readers than the Washington Post does (The Rebooting). And Banksy installed a marching man in Westminster overnight, flag obscuring the face (The Guardian).
So money, audience, and authority are all moving sideways out of the old vertical architecture into arrangements that don’t yet have institutional names. This week I looked into the relative size of non-profit culture and commercial culture, which helps put some of these issues in perspective. The culture universe is bigger than the structures that used to map it — which is the thread I pull in this week’s AJ Chronicles.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
