The Art of Monstrous Men

CN sexual assault In a poignant piece about reconciling enjoyment of art when the producer of that art is known to be morally or criminally suspect Claire Dederer has really gotten to the meat of the issue. While she doesn't end up giving us a definitive answer to whether we should embrace the art while separating …

How to raise Orchestra revenue with Live-to-Projection events

Some time ago I read a Silicon Valley Business Journal piece about the Symphony Silicon Valley's Live-to-Projection Lord of the Rings concerts. SSV President, Andrew Bales, expected to sell out the two full runs of the trilogy in their Center for the Performing Arts in San Jose. This would mean selling out 15,000 seats for …

Young Audiences (part 1): Hollywood, Classical Music, and the costs of Social Justice

In my previous post I talked about the minuscule returns that live audience ticket revenue gives for the total operating budget of movies. I'm going to divide this post into two parts as the first has gotten rather lengthy. In this post I've summarized some of the things I brought up in the previous one, …

Live audiences for Movies matter less than for Classical Music

So, one of my birthday gifts was a copy of Edward Jay Epstein's "The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies." The book opens with this snippet in the intro. There was a time around the middle of the twentieth century, when the box office numbers that were reported in newspapers were relevant …

Kaiser on the Royal Opera House Cinema Season

Michael Kaiser's latest blog post discusses the slowly growing trend for streaming to movie theaters as the Royal Opera House moves into that form of broadcast. The Royal Opera House recently announced it would soon begin beaming performances to American movie theaters, mimicking the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. We have also seen several high …