orchestra21

I long for the day when all of my colleagues in the orchestra business understand what Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and so many other forward-thinking institutions and individuals have already figured out about culture in the internet-age:

Museums have options. One, they can stay off the web, hoarding their treasures offline and doing what they’ve always done. Two, they can dabble on the web and try to use it as a marketing platform to maximize the value of their physical spaces. Three, they can take advantage of the Internet’s reach and figure out a way to become valuable within the new paradigm. We’ve seen a lot of options one and two, but the Walker is a definitive step down the third way.

Museums can continue to pull people inward, but they also have to push content outward. They have to learn to exist within different, overlapping ecosystems – Tumblr, Twitter, the art blog networks, cultural institution sites – and figure out how to receive ideas and content from those places, not just broadcast to them.

If the symphony biz wholeheartedly embraces the Walker’s third way we may finally begin to ‘stave off a slow spiral into irrelevance’.

[via theatlantic]