ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Douglas McLennan

Douglas McLennan
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Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal

Sweden Building World’s Largest City Of Wood

Mass timber—panels and beams made from layers of wood stacked together for extra strength—avoids the massive carbon footprint of standard construction materials like concrete...

Why Today’s “Best” Writers Don’t Have Readers

Want to be a novelist here in 2023? Well, there are thousands of people on hand to encourage you, tutor you and wave you on your way....

Museum Attendance Is Down All Over The World. Is There A Lesson?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, post-Covid and the other assorted turmoils of the past couple of years, galleries and auction houses around the world have...

The Emotional Toll Of Dying Onstage Every Night

“Halfway through the Broadway run, I started to feel the weight of doing this every single day. Everything was tight, so I talked to...

Disney Used AI For Opening Credits Of The New Marvel Movie. Backlash Ensues

In an interview with Polygon on Wednesday, director Ali Selim confirmed that AI operated by a company called Method Studios produced the opening sequence to the...

Artistic Exodus From Seattle — Seattle Opera Head Is Latest To Go

Christina Scheppelmann’s departure announcement comes amid leadership vacancies, or impending vacancies, at other high-profile Seattle arts organizations. - Seattle Times

Taylor Swift’s Billion-Dollar Machine

"If the current spending pace continues through the end of the tour, the Eras Tour will have generated an estimated $5 billion in...

Indignities Of The Old-School Book Tour

One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people...

How AI Will Unlock Now Artistic Worlds

Some 19th-century artists saw the advent of photography as a threat to painting. Instead of replacing painting, however, photography eventually liberated it from realism,...

The Ways Riccardo Muti Became Part Of Chicago

That Riccardo Muti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at all is a miraculous anomaly due to a perfect storm of unexpected...

Learning Kronos: 50 New Quartets For The Future

The idea, according to founding first violinist and Artistic Director David Harrington, was to commission 50 quartets from a variety of composers, and make...

How A Regional Foundation Radically Evolved To Serve The Arts

At a time of unprecedented need, do organizations owe it to their communities to move more money out the door, even if it threatens...

NYC’s High Line Park Gets A New Bridge

The first half of the bridge—a gently sloped, 340-foot-long arm coming out of the High Line Spur, as the final section of the elevated...

Why Have A Festival If It Doesn’t Take You Out Of The Ordinary?

“There’s no point coming here just to do one thing. Blowing in and out doesn’t work – financially! Performers get all that, and they...

What “The Truman Show” Got Right About Technology 25 Years Ago

Through Truman’s story, the movie predicted, with eerie acuity, the rise of reality TV, the transactions of social media, the banality of surveillance. But...

“Mao’s Last Dancer” To Retire

Li Cunxin, who found international fame for his remarkable rise from rural China to become one of the world’s leading ballet dancers, has announced...

Russians Revive Mariupol’s Bombed Theatre As Russian Culture Showcase

“This theater is being reborn and has restored its great reputation,” said Aleksandr Rostov, the theater’s new, Russian-appointed creative director in a video to...

Global Movie Box Office Up 27 Percent In The First Quarter Of 2023

Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) saw the largest spike in B.O., with a 32-percent year-on increase during the first quarter of the...

How AI Will Democratize Creativity

We lack the skill to move imagination from the brain to the real world, and, while we like to say "You can do anything...

A New “Generation-Changing” Museum For India

The new Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is due to open in 2026, near Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport. It will be “India’s national modern...

The Remarkable 2,700-Year-Old Rock Paintings Just Discovered In Sweden

The designs were made through a laborious process of smacking stones against the granite rock that exposed an underlayer of white. This color, in...

Why Writers Have Difficulty Talking About The Working Class

“There’s a class issue that we don’t always talk about in writing and publishing, where you need to be able to afford this life....

TV’s Tired Script Formulas Are Perfect For AI, Aren’t They?

Let’s get to the other side. After analyzing forty years’ worth of sitcom scripts and studio-audience laughter and applause levels, A.I. has unlocked the...

Is This True? Are We All Really Hardwired To Our Primitive Past?

“We have seemingly been hardwired with a number of cognitive biases that impede our ability to take appropriate action to address seemingly distant, gradual...

How Parking Explains American Cities (And What To Do About It)

You imagine the American city in the 1940s and ’50s and you think so many challenges being confronted—substandard housing, deindustrialization, racial strife, pollution—all this...
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