Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Data: Canada’s Arts Industry Economy Has Surpassed Pre-Pandemic Levels
Today’s analysis indicates that the performing arts have surpassed pre-pandemic levels of revenues and impact on GDP (i.e., the levels in 2019), neither of...
Los Angeles As A Literary Genre
Writers in Los Angeles? To the East Coast, such a notion was ridiculous. And yet, I was to discover, there was a freedom in...
Portland Maine Passes Moratorium On Proposed New Live Nation Venue After Musician Protests
Dozens of local musicians and venue operators said the city should take more time to evaluate whether it should bring Live Nation, which is...
Will AI Take Away Your Creative Job? We Don’t Think So
"We believe creative professionals can harness new technologies while still upholding their foundational creative and ethical principles." - The Conversation
Is Art Nouveau Ready For A Comeback In The Age Of AI?
More than a century on, as artificial intelligence offers a fresh tech challenge to humanity, a timely spot of revisionism appears to be taking...
Since Assisted Death Has Been Legal In Canada, More And More Canadians Are Choosing...
MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for...
Why Did The Whitney Suddenly Cancel Its Independent Study Program?
As democratic values in the United States erode at an accelerated pace, acts of silencing and erasure at artistic and academic institutions — think...
Wikipedia’s Huge AI Slop Problem
With the rise of AI writing tools, Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and...
UK’s New Online Age-Verification Law Is Causing Massive Censorship
While the law and others like it claim to be narrowly focused on pornographic content and material that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or...
What Happens When Ventriloquists Gather
Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent...
Report: Trump’s Kennedy Center Boss Is Largely AWOL From The Job
Ric Grenell, a former Trump ambassador to Germany and longtime Republican attack dog, is “only occasionally at the Kennedy Center,” a source told CBS News....
Anthropic Argues In Its Copyright Appeal Case That Settlement Would Put It Out Of...
As Anthropic argued, it now "faces hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages liability at trial in four months" based on a class...
If Cinema Is Dying, There’s Still Plenty To Say
Its infirmity has a number of culprits: superhero box office dominance, short-form videos eroding attention spans, streaming services hollowing out theatrical exhibition. - The Walrus
Public Media’s Slow Motion Crisis
For dozens of stations that depend heavily on federal dollars, a slow-motion crisis is now unfolding; many are already downsizing and cutting programming, and...
How Hollywood Is Pivoting To Conservative Audiences
The red-state audience that Hollywood is chasing isn’t a monolith, and there’s an experimental energy in the crop of shows catering to this newly...
The Individualist Trap: Hard To Believe In The Future
If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s...
Inhabiting The Machine: Make Peace Or Fight?
Machines no longer assist our lives from the outside; they increasingly define the conditions under which we think, work, and relate. And here Skidelsky...
If AI Really Can Make Movies, Then What Does Hollywood Become?
Luma’s generative AI platform, Dream Machine, debuted last year and points toward a new kind of moviemaking, one where anyone can make release-grade footage...
Why The Library Model Is A Great Business Model
What if long-term success is more about building environments where people feel inspired, curious, and connected? That’s what libraries do. And that’s what the...
How Spirituality Went From Uncool To Trendy In The Art World
The turn we are witnessing is wide-ranging, encompassing everything from an interest in esoteric rituals and the occult to the amplification of Indigenous, non-Western,...
How Anglo Literature Lost Its Global Influence
The imperialistic premise in this idea of literature as an egalitarian conversation between national traditions is blatant: as Milan Kundera remarked, what it took...
What Robert Wilson Meant For The Avant Garde
What made Wilson’s divergence from theatrical and classical conventions so powerful was his clear reverence for them — the careful, conscientious approach he took...
LA Arts Philanthropist Glorya Kaufman, 95
Glorya Kaufman, the philanthropist who transformed dance in Los Angeles through the establishment of an eponymous dance school at USC as well as a...
Where Have All The Horses Gone? We Struggle To Accept The Future And Let...
Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in...
Should Ideas Be Free? How Big Thinkers Have Thought About Intellectual Property
Should owning an idea be treated the same way as owning a physical object, or are these two forms of property rights ultimately incomparable? -...
