Worth a thousand words? Or $37 million. Darren Ornitz/Reuters
Americans clearly love their museums, particularly in the summer months. In fact, museum attendance is estimated at about 850 million visits a year, significantly more than all the major league sporting and theme parks combined (about 483 million in 2011).
Descendants of the Sun, a South Korean TV drama featuring a romance between a soldier and a surgeon in a fictional war-torn nation, is reigniting K-drama fever across Asia. In China alone, where the program is simultaneously broadcast online, it has drawn more than 2.4 billion views on video-streaming website iQIYI since it began airing in late February.
Media can only become regional or global in a broadcasting regime that enables content to move freely beyond national borders. Regional broadcasting, which was restricted in the 1980s in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, now allows for the legitimate transfer of content across national borders.
Within this framework, Japanese interaction with its East Asian neighbours can be viewed from two perspectives: politics and popular culture. The two are not mutually exclusive, but are driven by different forces.
Last Thursday, the world was shocked by the untimely death of Prince, the highly prolific, Grammy-winning music icon who not only transformed music and the record industry but also provoked questions about race, gender and sexuality.
The Oscars are the Olympics of the acting world: as well as being the most coveted of awards for those in the business, they are the most watched of the entertainment awards shows globally – broadcast internationally since 1969, they are now watched in more than 200 countries.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
Musician, actor, icon and entrepreneur. David Bowie was an innovator in every way. He stepped into the vacuum left by the Beatles’ break-up in 1970 and developed an array of strategies that have gone on to become the common sense of popular culture and of business itself.
Fandemonium. REUTERS/Aly Song
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has broken a number of box office records since its release. In addition, its popularity across the globe has led to projections that it will surpass Avatar as the top grossing film of all time. However, this will largely depend on China, which has the second-largest movie market after the US.
In a recent article titled “The Social Cost of Dishonesty,” we showed how imperfect markets – for example, where some parties have more information than others do – require the intervention of impartial authorities to adjust the balance of power and maximize the public good.
It did not surprise me at all to read that Royal Mail will issue special Star Wars stamps. In fact I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if, in the publicity around the release of Star Wars 7 on December 17, the Church of England were to issue Christmas cards with shepherds holding light sabres instead of crooks.
