Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Latest Micro-Genre: Books With AI
The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride,...
College Is Not Just About Acquiring Information
Higher education is not merely the transfer of knowledge. We live in an age of informational opulence; we are awash in readily available data...
A Fake Review Plague Is Threatening Businesses
Fraudsters are extorting businesses for hundreds of dollars each by threatening to post fake negative reviews on Google Maps — or posting fake negative...
Internet Archive Settles Suit With Recording Companies Over ’78 Recordings Archive
For IA—which strove to digitize 3 million recordings to help historians document recording history—the lawsuit from music publishers could have meant financial ruin. Initially, record...
The Jimmy Kimmel Suspension Is a Crisis For Free Speech
The right-wing cancellation campaign that has come to encompass all individuals and institutions that have expressed anything less than cloying adulation of Kirk is ongoing, with...
Broadway Musicals Are In Trouble
None of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season have made a profit yet. Some still could, but several have been...
YouTube Is Going All In On AI
Its anniversary product announcements this week touted AI features that will let creators use AI to enhance or produce videos. After all, Google Deepmind’s Veo 3 technology was YouTube’s for...
The Lucas Museum — So What, Exactly Is Narrative Art?
What is narrative art? Or, to be more precise, what is visual narrative art, since stories without pictures—as in novels, plays, and operas—don’t fit the museum’s...
Free Speech’s Corporate Media Problem
Paramount isn’t the only media company that needs FCC approval for something — and thus finds itself needing to kiss Carr’s ring. Nexstar, which...
What Happens To Democracy When The Comedians Are Gone
"Because there’s no platform, no space or infrastructure for that kind of satire to be accepted, we were basically pushed out … We are...
FTC, Seven States Sue Ticketmaster Over Deceptive Practices
The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California, accused Ticketmaster of deceptive practices that advertised lower...
Time To Rethink What An “Emerging” Artist Means?
Our institutions insist on enforcing chrononormativity. They set age caps, define categories vaguely, and reward those who stay closest to the script. My experience...
Harvard Is Translating Archives Into AI Databases
In June, the initiative shared nearly a million books from a Harvard Library collection with AI researchers, spanning more than 254 languages and dating...
Are Visa And Border Issues Causing International Performers To Reconsider US Tours?
Performers, event presenters, booking agents and lawyers tell NPR that they are dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now – and they have...
Inside Philly’s New Calder Museum
It is one of the strangest cultural complexes to be built anywhere in recent years. On an unpromising site no larger than a football...
What AI Doomers Get Wrong About Artificial Intelligence
To take one of their examples, a superintelligent chatbot “trained to delight and retain users so that they can be charged higher monthly fees...
How Late Night TV Fell Apart
Though late-night shows still attract millions of viewers across more channels than ever—including YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram—writers say that networks have still not figured...
The Character Sketch As Philosophical Genre
The character sketch is a genre that is descriptive by nature, and that today reads as a little sociological, a little literary, and more...
Immersive Theatre Comes To Your Hotel Room
By taking the work into unconventional, donated spaces, they’re betting on a future where audiences don’t just consume theater but inhabit it. Time Out New...
Inside The Hyper-Engineered Theme Park Experience
To manage the thousands of people who descend daily, operators have studied visitors’ behavior and engineered their parks to move people around without anyone...
Why The Death Of Criticism Debate Is Annoying
Media organizations do not want cultural criticism the same way they do not want war reporting or fluffy opinion pieces as those specific things. They...
The Arts Are Under Attack. So What To Do?
You have always believed the arts are necessary ingredients of a healthy community, whether or not you used that language explicitly. We now know, through...
Against Free Speech. Really?
In another generation, intellectual historians like Dabhoiwala will look back to the present and ask themselves how it happened that, early in the 21st...
Glenn Lowry’s Warning On Leaving MoMA
"If we want a museum that will collect and display the most daring and challenging artists of our time, then we will have to...
The TikTok Deal: China Would Keep The Algorithm
Ultimately, China gets to keep the TikTok algorithm, simply licensing the algorithm to the US instead of handing over the heart of TikTok's success....
