Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Brooklyn Museum Cancels Layoffs After City Comes Through With More Money
Facing a growing deficit, the Brooklyn Museum announced its intent to cut around 47 full- and part-time workers — more than 10% of its staff —...
Inside Egypt’s New Grand Museum (The Opening Is Still In Question)
The museum, which allegedly cost $1 billion dollars, funded largely through Japanese loans and contributions from the Egyptian government, was first proposed by Hosni...
The Most Comprehensive Tour Of The Smithsonian Ever?
For many residents, visiting every local Smithsonian museum is a bucket list item. Kathryn Jones’s journey takes that challenge to the extreme. The 33-year-old...
The Louvre Launches A Design Competition To Expand The Museum
The winner of the international contest will be selected in October by a 21-person jury of experts from around the world and announced early...
International Support Grows For Returning Parthenon Marbles
There is a growing international momentum behind Greece’s campaign, as U.K. negotiations inch closer to a possible resolution and global public opinion continues to shift...
Julianne And Derek Hough’s New Kind Of Dance Competition
This fall, in partnership with the company DanceOne, they’re launching a dance tour called Ovation by DanceOne, which merges ballroom and commercial competition traditions into one...
Dissident Art: A Dancing Trump On The National Mall
On Thursday morning, a life-size, gold-painted television set appeared near Third Street NW, pointed squarely at the Capitol, the Washington Post reported. Its screen played a silent...
I Observe. Must I Translate?
Human beings with a lot to say like to make noise. So do crickets, dogs, mice, other insects, rabbits when frightened or being killed,...
Canada’s Official Archives Are In Peril
After Confederation, some of the country’s oldest records were stashed in a loft in the reading room of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill....
The Met Museum’s Difficult Line Through Its Re-thought African Collection
The wing’s design stresses each region’s singularity while fostering an atmosphere of cosmopolitan exchange. We’re meant to feel that the Met is no longer...
The Struggle For A “Self” We Recognize
We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues,...
We All Read. But Our Reading Has Changed. This Has Changed Our Culture (And...
On average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over...
What Toni Morrison Was Like As An Editor
Her unwavering commitment to shoring up the integrity of a book at every stage solidified her legacy as an editor who could turn talent,...
Kennicott On The Met Museum’s Non-European Wing: Making The Case For Context
To appreciate these works only as visual objects exacerbates the intellectual violence of decontextualization. The Met has responded to this by writing extensive object...
How Much Do You Know About Publishing At The Beginnings Of America?
Which of America’s founding fathers began writing his memoirs in the early 1770s, a project that remained unfinished when it was posthumously published in...
Jordan Roth Made A Career Getting Other People’s Work Onto Broadway. Now He’s Making...
“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my...
The 21st Century’s Best Movies Reveal The Collapse Of Genre
What strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader...
Hollywood’s Big AI Dilemma
The idea that AI-generated video is both the future of filmmaking and an existential threat to Hollywood has caught on like wildfire among boosters...
Making the Creative Turn: Is Using AI Cheating?
Throughout the digital age, Big Tech has promised us products that will make us more efficient and save time, which, it is assumed, is always an obvious good. It’s a cliché that tools shape the things we make. And through most of our history, better tools have helped us create better things. But what if this isn’t always true?
Warning: Welsh Traditional Folk Music Could Die Out Within A Generation
The review into the traditional music scene in Wales found traditional music sectors in England, Scotland and Ireland benefited from a "wide range of...
Financially-Troubled Vancouver Art Gallery Will Cut A Third Of Its Staff
There are currently 129 full-time staff, and 29 of the 90 unionized staff will be affected. The cuts come after the VAG’s annual general...
The Perils Of Thinking That Better Design Will Fix Things
Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can’t; the history of design is full of utopian projects that...
Cutting Public Media Funding Means Rural Stations Closing. Here’s What That Means In Louisiana
"There are a couple of parishes in Louisiana that have nothing, not even any kind of newspapers. They're empty completely. And it's just like...
So Just Why Did Prehistoric Humans Decide To “Start” Civilization?
Why did humans spend 50,000 years (or more) in seemingly uneventful prehistory — with hunter-gatherers living the exact same way across thousands of generations...
A Former Museum Director’s Cautionary Tale About Intimidation And Coercion
“There is a kind of performative sheen or a performative element that is not about just the fact of quashing opposition wherever it might...
