Make It Simple? Hire an artist.
People keep talking about the new wisdom for building technology products, from web apps to phones to enterprise software: “Keep it simple. It’s gotta make sense to people.” “Focus on making amazing things instead of a profit.” “Trust your instincts and your talent, and push them.” “Refine and simplify over and over again.” “It can’t...
Diamonds, Olive Oil, Champagne and Creativity
Idle thought: It’s not often that the basic value of something changes. There are bubbles and fads, like tulips, mortgage backed securities and snap bracelets. But it’s not often that big changes in the value of something we’ve had all along happen in the minds of whole societies. Champagne It happened with champagne in the...
Step 2
I just found out about this community, and I hope it really takes off. It’s full of individual artists and their stories. People are talking about how they’re selling their art, and what they’re finding out. One the one hand it’s really great to read what so many of my colleagues are doing. On the...
The Fourth Wall Are Making It Up
The Fourth Wall Ensemble are old friends of mine, and I love them dearly. They play instruments and move around a lot on stage. That, in case you missed it, is totally up my alley. They’re uploading a bunch of great little youtube videos that do a lot of work for them all at once....
Seth Godin Is Talking About Tribes
Seth Godin talking to a room full of arts marketers at the Capacity Interactive‘s Digital Marketing Boot Camp for Arts Marketers and he, quite rightly, says that everyone in the world, but these groups in particular, needs to think about organizing groups of highly energized people instead of trying to interrupt people in the course...
A Question To Help Individuals Working In The Arts
I wrote this as a comment for Diane Ragsdale’s excellent post on digitisation in the arts, and some of the different thinking about new trends and technologies surrounding the question. It got a good bit longer than I had intended, and I think there’s an interesting thought here. Instead of framing questions for “the field...
David Smooke’s Imaginary Audience
About a month ago David Smooke wrote a great piece for NewMusicBox called The Audience Does Not Exist. In it, he argues that imagining “the audience” in your head, and then trying to write music in order to please it, is basically a fool’s errand. He argues that it’s much more sensible to trust your...
Steve, Usability, and the Gradient Audience
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. The tributes to Steve Jobs, and this recent blog post from Ian Moss on usability studies in arts programming seem like a good jumping off point. The thing I’ve always loved about Apple products, and the thing I’ve sometimes found irritating about Apple products, is...
More thoughts from the FMC – intersecting art and marketing
Commence the heresy: art and marketing are fundamentally the same. There’s a reason that Jim Henson‘s work flowed so easily from commercials to purely Muppet-based stuff. Both the artists and the marketers are trying to make awesome experiences. But marketers are trying to get you to buy stuff because of that experience (or recommend a...
Fantasy Software inspired by the Future of Music Coalition 2011 Policy Summit
It’s still day 1 at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit 2011, and I’m sitting in the conference hall as I write this. Talking to Glenn from ReverbNation, and listening to this morning’s panel on ticketing has me thinking about software. Specifically, I’m thinking about how text analytics (machines that can read and understand...
Summer’s Twilight video libretto
Earlier this month Rose Ginsberg and I got together a group of actors to workshop some mime sections of Summer’s Twilight. We spent the afternoon trying out different things, working scenes till they gelled, and filming the process to create a kind of video libretto. The filming was as low-key as you can get, just...
The .doc file of J. Alfred Prufrock
A friend of mine just posted this on facebook, and since it’s a fun webby parody of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I thought I’d post it here. You can hear Zachary Herchen playing my setting of the poem for acting saxophone here.
