A hopeful and optimistic treatise that will surely be required reading for performing arts students.
A guidebook for aspiring performing artists to help them navigate the business side of showbiz.
The economic landscape for performing artists is shifting. Technology, evolving tastes, and the financial trouble of institutions like the New York City Opera, which closed in 2013, are changing how performing artists maintain their livings. With this uncertainty comes a greater need for the new generation of artists to understand how their training is equipping them—or not—to deal with infrequent gig cycles and programming that skews more toward popular culture. As Moore, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Music Center, explains, her experience speaking with young performing artists in schools and at the beginnings of their careers has proven that they are mostly ill-prepared for the realities of the business aspects of their trade. To remedy this, the author has compiled a handy guide that addresses issues as wide-ranging as intellectual property, networking, and self-branding for the betterment of the future of the arts. Moore’s advice is steeped in her professional experience as an arts administrator and enlivened by her experience as a professional ballet dancer. With a genuine passion and desire to help other artists, she outlines her keys to success for a sustainable career. One critical chapter focuses on financial management. As more and more performing arts jobs move freelance, writes Moore, it is crucial that artists understand how to personally manage their incomes, deduct estimated taxes, and plan for periods during which jobs are scarce. Aside from the entrepreneurial tips, the author makes it clear that her most important principle is self-affirmation. The success of any artist, she claims, is dependent on the artist’s ability to remain confident in the face of rejection and not undercut his/her value through needless self-deprecation or comparisons to other artists.
A hopeful and optimistic treatise that will surely be required reading for performing arts students.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0595-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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