Who decides what counts as “best,” and why do some labels endure? Tom Service, writing in The Guardian, poses the uncomfortable classical-music question: what does it mean to call the Berlin Philharmonic “the best orchestra in the world,” and how has that tag survived a half-century of conductors, politics and technology. The roundup that flags his piece suggests the answer isn’t strictly in the playing; it’s in who confers the title and why it sticks.
Reputation vs. survival
Recent headlines test the power of reputation against real-world outcomes. Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences announced its closure on Tuesday and had a rescue deal by Wednesday, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer — two hundred years of standing compressed into a single news cycle. By contrast, Georgia Ensemble Theatre, after 34 years, saw no rescue and no formal announcement; according to ArtsATL, the board simply went quiet. And in Louisville, a high school’s cancelled Ragtime drew a million views and Broadway’s attention before it drew the district’s, per Playbill.
Taken together, these snapshots underscore an observation in the roundup: what determines who gets saved isn’t age or quality so much as whether anyone with money or a megaphone is paying attention.
Who’s watching — and paying
Boston Ballet clearly had eyes on it: People reports that an anonymous patron wrote a $10 million check. In Edinburgh, The Stage notes that arts groups will get their pay from tourists, through a visitor levy worth up to £50 million a year. Those are very different mechanisms — a single benefactor versus a civic policy — but each channels attention into resources.
Meanwhile, outside the nonprofit arts, TheWrap points out that at 25, the Adult Swim TV channel is thriving while much of cable fades, and even its own people can’t explain why. Longevity, profile and performance aren’t mapping neatly onto outcomes; visibility and the structures that convert it into support appear to matter more.
Which brings us back to labels like “the best orchestra in the world.” As Service’s question implies, such rankings persist less because of immutable standards than because influential arbiters say so — and keep saying so. The week’s stories, from Philadelphia to Edinburgh, trace the same contour line: reputations rise and fall on who’s watching, who’s speaking, and who’s willing to underwrite what they see.
Vía artsjournal.com
