Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Kennedy Center Board Votes To Close For Two Years
The full scope of the renovations is not entirely clear. But Mr. Trump has said that both structural and internal work was needed, noting...
How Did A Tiny Obscure Art School Get A $2M NEH Grant?
The grant was about as large as the school’s annual budget. And like many of the agency’s other recent multimillion-dollar awards, it went to a...
History Of Triumphant Arches: An Empire In Decline
Some of the most famous iterations in ancient Rome and Napoleonic France warn us of the tendency of republics to devolve into autocratic empires. -...
Think You Can Tell If That Song You Like Was Made By AI?
The Afro-soul cover highlights a growing challenge — the difficulty identifying when generative AI has been used in production — and how audiences, platforms...
The Prestige Novel Is Dead
Although the literary novel remains the touchstone for what “elite” cultural status might mean, its former midcentury monopoly on prestige, Brier claims, has been...
How Math And Literature Are Closely Related
Literature and mathematics have these strong connections because mathematics is all about structure and pattern. It's the language we use to describe those things. -...
Study: Autocomplete Changes How People Write
Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI. - Scientific American
That Wallpaper Music That Surrounds Us
Sync, it’s called. Once it was known as library music; sometimes it’s called production music. It’s not really a genre. It’s a category, defined...
How Barnes & Noble Became Popular Again
Barnes & Noble is experiencing a revival. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do the same this year. It is reportedly soliciting banks to...
Trump Now Wants To Replace Columns On The Front Of The White House With...
The Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those...
AJ Chronicles: The Biggest Fights about Culture
These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. This week we collected 118 stories. Here's what I learned:
Richard Grenell Out At The Kennedy Center
He leaves behind an institution that is drastically changed, and in many ways diminished, from a year ago, when Mr. Trump installed himself as chairman and filled...
Eight Projects By This Year’s Pritzker Prize Winning Architect
Following the news that Smiljan Radić has won this year's delayed Pritzker Architecture Prize, we round up eight projects from the Chilean architect's experimental career. - Dezeen
Why Aren’t Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Selling?
The architect’s passion for combining design and nature meant that many of his residences were built in rural areas. Because of their pedigree, they...
Classical Music Magazine Is Shutting Down
The magazine was sold to Mark Allen by Rhinegold Publishing in December 2018, together with other titles such as Music Teacher, Choir & Organ...
Those Who Resist Super-Popular Culture
I’ve come to call it “hype aversion”: an avoidance of the pop-culture products that seemingly everyone insists I would like. It’s not that I’m...
What Entertainment Might Look Like Years From Now
What kinds of disruptive changes will the next two decades bring? We asked five entertainment experts to predict one big change we’ll see in...
Calgary Is Making Enormous Investments In Arts And Culture. It Shows
“As we make our way to two million, there’s the 35,000-foot level where the role for artists to play is quite significant and very...
Atlanta, Once The “Hollywood Of The South,” Sees Its Film/TV Industry Shrink
After hitting a peak of $4.4 billion in 2022, spending on film and TV production in Georgia has tumbled, reaching just $2.3 billion in...
Kosman: The Disappearing Music Critic
The time when every musical event, every world premiere, every opera opening, was the spark for a lively public discussion is gone. In its...
Big Loss: One Of LA’s Best Dance Companies, Bodytraffic, Will Close
The company’s end wasn’t planned, but it became necessary when its artistic director and co-founder, Tina Finkelman Berkett, decided to step back from her...
Paramount and Live Nation/Ticketmaster Won Big Last Week: Here’s why Orchestras and Theatres and...
Two huge culture industry deals in the past week, both in entertainment, and maybe they don't seem connected. Certainly not connected to non-profit arts. But these are exactly the kind of culture infrastructure deals that should worry anyone in the commercial or non-profit culture business because they impact us all.
There Are Fewer Than 10 Full Time Book Critics Left
By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any...
What Happens When Art Experts And AI Disagree On Authentication?
Combining machine learning, deep neural networks and computer vision algorithms, Art Recognition’s approach can, in theory, be adapted to any painter with a big...
The Art Market Grew In 2025. But…
The recovery, however, came with an asterisk. While auctions bounced back strongly, galleries barely budged, and much of the market’s growth came from a...
