Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Is London’s West End Dying? Not So Fast, Says Lyn Gardner
Writing theatre’s obituary based on misinformation or dismissing the entire art form as a turn-off on the basis of a single theatre visit (nobody...
Why Haven’t Claes Oldenburg’s Sculptures Found Permanent Home In New York City?
Incredibly, for an artist who made New York his home for nearly 70 years, none of the fanciful public sculptures like these — the...
US Book Sales Ticked Up In 2024
In 2024, sales gradually improved over the course of the year and saw a 1.6% increase in the fourth quarter. For the full year,...
An Updated List Of LA Cultural Buildings Impacted By The Fires
On Wednesday, the Palisades fire claimed Will Rogers’s historic ranch house and other structures on the Will Rogers State Historic Park, according to a news...
A Climber Drove Climbing Bolts Into Ancient Petroglyphs
Such petroglyphs were designated by the state’s legislature as official state works of art in 2023, the Utah Bureau of Land Management noted, as it called...
Scotland’s National Galleries Warn That Major Cultural Assets Are In Peril Because Of Funding...
The organisation, which is responsible for more than 130,000 works of art and attracted more than 2.4m visitors to its sites during 2023, has...
Audiences Are Singing Along, Acting Out At “Wicked” Movie Showings
During the theatrical run of “ Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour ” last fall, fans danced and belted lyrics in the theaters, sharing their glee on social media. Last...
Globalization Gets A Bad Rap Now. But Globalization Has Been With Us For Centuries
Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale,...
Getting Our Heads Around Understanding Bullshit
To account fully for the phenomenon of bullshit, we require a conception that envisions the bullshitted to expect that someone completely unlike him or...
Tough Times For Theatre? Right. So It’s Not A Time To Be Timid
How can theatres and individual artists position themselves as liaisons to the public to raise awareness about climate change, gun violence, mental health, and literacy?...
With Art Sales Down, Auction Houses Pivot Towards Luxury Sales
Sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were down for the second year in a row in 2024. With both supply and demand for big-ticket art...
Daniel Harding, Conductor (Oh And Air France Pilot Too)
Over the past few years, the British-born Harding has led dual, and often dueling, careers: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies one day, piloting commercial...
British Fiction Generated Record Sales In 2024
BookTok, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the indomitable Richard Osman led Fiction, with the category accounting for the year’s top five titles, 16 of...
New Discoveries At Luxor Could “Reconstruct” History
Artifacts found at the tombs included bronze coins with the image of Alexander the Great dating to the Time of Ptolemy I (367-283), children’s...
Could (Should?) Cities Be Built Of Wood?
I’ve been waiting years for the emergence of a bold timber architecture with designs that take advantage of the material’s expressive personality, its strength...
Why Boulez Matters (On The 100th Anniversary Of His Birthday)
The very precise way he used his hand helped communicate to players across the arena of an orchestra exactly where they were in the...
Hollywood Presses Pause As Wildfires Engulf LA
Amid the ongoing wildfires in Southern California, a number of glitzy Hollywood events and red carpet premieres have also been cancelled. - CNN
How Boston’s Faneuil Hall Came To Embody The Complicated Idea Of America
Figures from every corner of politics have used the hall for events and rallies, amplifying the legend “that this is where the idea of...
The Role Of Public Philosophy In Difficult Times
The practice of public philosophy is thriving today in a surprising number of forms. Different approaches give rise to meta-level questions about the nature...
Tracking The Rising Costs Of Streaming Subscriptions
In the audio-visual world, they have a name for the phenomenon depicted above – where rival platforms repeatedly increase their prices, inspiring their competitors to...
NBCUniversal, Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery, DirecTV and Comcast Team Up On New Ad Platform
Universal Ads, as the new venture is called, was announced Monday as a collaborative effort to combat the domination of Google, Meta and other...
What Two YouTubers’ Stories Tell Us About The New Economics Of Creativity
Colin Furze demonstrates that in certain corners of the creative economy an individual with minimal overhead can work on select attention-catching projects and earn...
Can Animals Make Art?
If we take art to be something that is beautiful and consciously created – and animals consciously create things that look like art –...
Ingesting Writing For Translation, Transformation
When considering writing as a function of the body, we face the work’s physical, irreplicable quality. Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages...
Why Even Thinking About Utopias Seems Remote
When national politics is becoming increasingly polarised, global conflicts are escalating to new temperatures, and the toll of the climate catastrophe grows deadlier, the...
