Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
If The Arts Are In Crisis, What Should Arts Journalism Be?
If the media really want to cover what’s roiling culture — and how these forces reflect our fissuring society — the old “happy talk”...
The Writing Machines: They Won’t Kill Good Writing
These days, it is something of a fool’s errand to try to determine whether a text encountered online is written by a human or...
Artist Robert Irwin, 95
Within the contemporary art world, Mr. Irwin’s work on human attention and perception — he called it, with a nod to scientific research, an...
Movie Theatres Fear Terrible Holiday Season As Strike Drags On
Hollywood hoped SAG-AFTRA and studios would resolve their contract negotiations by the end of October. But the strike drags on, preventing major stars from...
British Library Puts Chaucer Manuscripts Online
In a “major milestone” for the library, which holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer, it is hoped the digital platform will enable...
Be Like Taylor? Lessons In Branding And Audience Relationship From A Superstar
Unlike other influencers who might give a peek at what they’re eating for breakfast or what products they recommend, Swift gives fans insight into...
No Pressure: Finishing Sondheim’s Last Musical
"You have to consider the fact that he was in his 80s working on a musical about going into a room that you can't...
A Crisis Of Art Criticism
The reasons for the stepchild status of criticism are as manifold as are their concatenations, not the least of which is the problem of...
Dutch Architecture Has Been Getting Greener. But Also More Boring?
Without getting overly nostalgic, it is almost impossible not to notice that the country, which for a good two decades on either side of...
If Thinking Is Good, What Is Over-Thinking?
Is there really such a thing as ‘thinking too much’? After all, thinking a lot seems like what one has to do in order...
Spotify CEO Talks About New Audiobook Service And AI Creation
Premium subscribers get 15 hours free a month and can top that off with discrete credit card payments if they want more. “We are...
The Frankfurt Book Fair Has A Long History Of Political Calculation
A commercial book fair might not immediately seem a site of position-taking, but as we discovered when researching our book, The Frankfurt Book Fair...
Staff At 92nd Street Y Quit After Cancellation Of Author Event
Staff from The 92nd Street Y, New York are resigning, after the storied cultural hub abruptly halted a scheduled reading by author Viet Thanh...
The Evolving Notion Of Fame For Artists
Unlike El Greco or Van Gogh, very few artists are household names these days. Fame in the art world is about having currency in...
When Musicians’ Bodies Turn On Them
The term dystonia is rooted in the Latin prefix dys, or difficulty, and tonus, meaning tone or tension. It refers to involuntary disruptions in muscle tone...
The Top Classical Music Radio Station In America? It’s In Portland Oregon
“We’ve received our ratings from Nielsen, and they said it is not even close,” said All Classical’s President and CEO Suzanne Nance. “We’ve been...
A Northern Ireland Orchestra: Peace Through Music
The key aim was to use music to connect young people from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds on both sides of the Irish border. Almost...
Study: Why Art Seems Better When You See Something Of Yourself In It
A recent set of studies in the journal Psychological Science suggests that a more personal factor – specifically, how much a piece of art seems to relate, in...
CBC Ditched ExTwitter. Didn’t Make Much Difference
"The audience and engagement that we get from X is small. Among our social media platforms, X is among the smallest sources of traffic,"...
Americans Are Cutting Back Their Streaming Subscriptions
Reports said that many Americans were paying for up to six streaming services. Since then, numbers have mostly returned to pre-pandemic with Americans paying...
Cleveland Museum Of Art Sues Feds To Block Seizure Of Ancient Sculpture
The lawsuit comes two months after a New York judge issued a search warrant citing “reasonable cause” to believe the statue, which was legally...
New Tool Lets Artists “Poison” Their Images At The Pixel Level To Thwart AI
Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering...
The Twisty-Turny Saga Of The British Museum Thefts
So began an antiques whodunit—whose cast of characters includes an Oxford-based priest-cum-archaeologist, a handful of rare-gem dealers and some of the British Museum’s most...
Ex-Prime Minister Berlusconi Bought 25,000 Junky Paintings On TV. His Heirs Are Having Difficulty...
The former Italian prime minister, who died in June, bought many of the paintings and sculptures from late-night telesales programmes. Managing the extensive collection...
Why Public Monuments Are Problematic
The problem with monuments and statues goes far beyond the issue of the legacies of slavery, important as that issue is. We need to...
