Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks
Good Morning,
The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol's Dataland — billed as the world's first AI art museum — got a...
Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama
While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized...
Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto
A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the...
AI: A Philosophy About Language
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training....
New Google Paper Argues AI Will Never Be Conscious
The paper shows the divergence between the self-serving narratives AI companies promote in the media and how they collapse under rigorous examination. - 404...
A Detailed Account Of The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist
A former FBI agent who led the investigation for more than two decades is now offering the first detailed account of how investigators reached...
Why AI Is Struggling With Creativity
Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement. - The Conversation
Docs: Adelaide Writers Week Sacrificed To Save Arts Festival
Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents...
Why It’s So Difficult To Agree On Truth
These different notions of truth shape everyday discourse as well as philosophical debate. They might help explain why some arguments feel pointless, why political...
Director of Production-Seattle Children’s Theatre working with Management Consultants for the Arts
Seattle Children’s Theatre, one of the nation’s premiere organizations for theatre-for-young audiences, invites applications from dedicated and collaborative leaders for its Director of Production position.
So An AI Has Just Declared A Painting By A Street Artist More Valuable...
What’s worth more—a Picasso or a painting by a street artist no one has heard of? According to the AI model we built, the...
How Short-Form Video Clips Took Over The Internet
Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form...
Martha Graham’s Revolution Continues
Graham saw herself primarily as a dancer—she made dances, she said, so that she would have something to dance. It could be said that...
The New LACMA: Architectural Drama At The Expense Of Art
Carolina Miranda: "In some ways, this freeway-like building could not be more LA: messy, sprawling, too big to take in from a single vantage...
AI Can Make Anyone An “Influencer”
Across social media, an influx of A.I.-generated avatars is reshaping what it means to be an influencer. A Facebook group called Baddies in AI,...
Who Does Trump Want To Hire To Redo The National Mall Reflecting Pool? His...
Trump originally envisioned the pool being topped with turquoise so that it would look like the Bahamas, but was convinced by the contractor to...
Former LiveNation Exec Says He Was Fired After Raising Concerns Over Business Practices
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the company’s business practices. As a result, he says, he was...
What Did It Take To Put Together The Met’s Epic Raphael Show?
The largest survey dedicated to the Renaissance master in the U.S. includes 33 of his paintings and 142 works on paper. About 60 public...
The Vegas Sphere Could Have Been An Epic Disaster. Instead It Sells More Tickets...
The venue that created a new type of live entertainment has become the highest-grossing arena in the world, with $379 million on 1.7 million...
Opera contra opera
Good Morning,
Two opera pieces landed on ArtsJournal today, pointed in opposite directions. In Opera America, an argument that the form will die unless it...
AJ Chronicles: Perils of Philanthropy — The Metropolitan Opera
We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter
LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum?
LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters
I Am Anti-AI. How Do We Get It Out Of Schools?
At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives...
The Ideas Challenging This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists
This year’s prize arrives at a moment when sculpture, funding structures and art education are becoming unusually entangled. - The Conversation
Blame It On The Culture
Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke “culture” as an explanation or, even...
