Dartblog

From Jeffrey James, Director of the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth, on engaging David Michalek’s Slow Dancing:

In response to your question about cost, the Hopkins Center, in line with practice in the performing arts field, does not disclose or discuss artists’ contract negotiations, both for benefit of the Hop’s negotiating position and for the protection and benefit of the artists’ negotiating position.

We can only hope that every dollar Dartmouth spent on Slow Dancing was spent in the best possible way. And that someone specifically and intently thought that question through.

(I suppose if one wanted to get an upper or lower bound on the cost, one could plant a rumor of some particular dollar amount $X and wait for an administrative response. If there emerged public outcry over the cost $X, we would hear either (a) nothing, in which case the true cost was greater than or equal to $X, or (b) an official announcement that the cost was less than $X. This is how we learned that the hair in the library cost less than $2 million.)