This Week's Free ArtsJournal newsletter for 05/16/2021

Real care has to be taken with comparing data on prices and audience characteristics, because the prices were set in the first place as a result of local audience characteristics. There is no universal ‘demand curve’ for the arts: each company has a unique situation based on where it is. – Michael Rushton

New York City has announced a new program, City Artist Corps, inspired by FDR’s Works Progress Administration. There are two major problems with launching a WPA-styled policy in 2021, one in terms of the choice of policy, and one in terms of the very conception of arts policy. Let’s look at these in turn. – Michael Rushton

As I put it in a program note: “It’s a COVID-period entertainment: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive.” – Joseph Horowitz

“Everything I’ve done in my life,” he told me at the beginning of our wide-ranging conversation in his office, “has really been to challenge the status quo—not to be satisfied with the way things are, but to try to improve them.” I “get” Eli, perhaps because (as I learned from his book) we had a lot in common. – Lee Rosenbaum

The Senior Program Coordinator of the National Accelerator at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts speaks about the impact of collaboration and fellowships on students. – Aaron Dworkin