Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Art, Diplomacy, And The Propaganda Of Ideas
Is there a way for the government to support art without corrupting it? And if not, how can we ensure that art still remains...
AI And The Future Of Opera
It seems clearer that creatives using AI tools as a part of their own processes is considered more acceptable than administrators using AI to...
Klaus Mäkelä, The Chicago Symphony, And The Importance Of Lived Experience
Cultural memory—for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act—risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will...
A Transformative Arts Project For Downtown Calgary
“Today, we don’t just reveal a stunning new design—we come together to celebrate the fact that the largest cultural infrastructure project currently underway in...
Record Labels Are Pulling Music From TikTok. Congress Might Ban The App. So Now...
TikTok began life as Musical.ly, an app to film oneself lip-syncing to songs. Interacting with pop music was a core function of TikTok. Fans...
Scientists Are Trying To Measure Our Emotional Reaction To Art
New scientific investigations into the embodied experience of viewing art point us toward more concrete answers, but also more questions. - Hyperallergic
Claim: YouTube Is The Most Consequential Technology In America
Maybe you don’t know that YouTube is also the most popular way to hear music and one of the country’s largest cable TV providers....
AI Companies Are Running Out Of Data
Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available...
Meta Considered Buying Simon & Schuster To Train Its AI
According to the recordings, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told executives that the company had used almost every book, poem and...
Motion Picture Association Ramps Up Anti-Piracy Plan
If the MPA’s plan sounds familiar, it’s because it has tried this before. It helped hatch the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012, which...
UMG’s Fight With TikTok Is Hurting Musicians
“TikTok is how you get the word out about a new song — and now you’re muting someone’s entire catalog? The labels say TikTok...
Spotify Has Demonetized Music Tracks With Fewer Than 1000 Plays
In an attempt to tackle fraudulent activity on the platform, the digital music service now also requires a minimum number of unique listeners for...
Fraud Fail: Musicians Are Seeing Their Music Being Taken Down From Streaming Services
Although distributors and streaming services frequently use language that places the blame on the artist for fraudulent activity detected on their accounts, it has become...
Apps That Summarize Books Are A Multi-Threat Danger To Publishing
Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So...
Librarians Under Threat Of Jail, Lawsuits In Trump 2nd-Term Agenda
In the foreword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a possible second Donald Trump administration, it says “people who produce and distribute...
Does Science Fiction Help Define The Future?
Science fiction prides itself on being visionary, but like any literary genre, it just ends up examining whatever issues the author is working through...
What An Acting Ensemble Brings To The Work
“That era of celebrating acting ensembles—it’s rare, and it’s rare to find opportunities to try to do that. But in some ways, those are...
In Chechnya, A New Ban On Dance Music That’s Too Slow Or Too Fast
The Russian republic of Chechnya has banned dance music it deems either too fast or too slow, in an attempt to quash a “polluting” western influence...
At Paris’ Pasteur Institute, The Music Rocks
The Pasteur Institute has made advancements in another field — the musical arts — as some of its scientists have formed bands and other...
The Art Of Good Audio-Describing
Audio describers need to locate the gaps and silences in a show, so that their descriptions are woven around music and dialogue. It is...
When Language Gets In The Way Of Trying To Think
Why are we so afraid to use words freely, to offend with impunity? Whence arose this fetish for the ‘purity’ of the text? I...
Why It’s Difficult For Chatbots To Have Meaningful Conversations
The heart of the problem is that chatbots are designed to identify the quickest path to an answer, which rarely involves reading everything. It...
Workers Restoring San Francisco’s Castro Theatre Find 100-Year-Old Missing Arch
As with excavations near Egyptian pyramids, sometimes the team finds something they never expected. In the case of the Castro, it was an entire...
Movie Theatres’ Architecture Is Saving Some Of Them From Bankruptcy
Skyrocketing construction costs and these oddball building characteristics have prompted many property owners to cut theaters’ rent just to keep the spaces occupied. - The...
Huge Increase In Attempts To Ban Books In 2023. There Were 4240 Titles Targeted
By comparison, the number of book titles challenged annually from 2000 to 2020 was fairly stable and never exceeded 400 targets in a given...
