Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Disney Loses Subscribers, Reports Mixed Earnings
Disney+ reported a total of 146.1 million subscribers for the quarter, a decrease of 11.7 million from 157.8 million in the previous quarter. - The...
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Trends: This summer we're seeing the convergence of long-time declines and failures of business models supporting the arts. This has led to a crisis...
How The Freewheeling Edinburgh Fringe Deals With Cancel Culture
"When you look back at what the fringe has turned out, surely a wee bit of it somewhere can be allowed to upset. It's...
Google And Music Companies In Negotiations On What To Do With DeepFake Music
Google and Universal Music are in talks to license artists’ melodies and voices for songs generated by artificial intelligence as the music business tries to monetize...
American Universities Have Been On A Massive Spending Spree
The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one...
Could AI Become Conscious? How Would We Know?
What is or might be the evidence in favor of consciousness in a large language model, and what might be the evidence against it? ...
Consider: Taylor Swift, Dancer
As dance, the show is simple and unoriginal — yet exceptionally effective. Swift is a pop superstar who dances but is not known for...
China Has Severely Restricted Screen Time For Children. Is It Working?
Many parents, both in and outside China, have celebrated Beijing’s past parental controls as the right approach for a government to take. But will all those people be...
Brice Marden, 84
Marden’s style may have made him different from many of his colleagues with more explicitly conceptual ambitions, but he continued to find admirers because...
Hollywood’s Self-Sabotage
To survey the film and television industry today is to witness multiple existential crises. Many of them point to a larger trend: of Hollywood...
Why Save The Current Form Of American Theatre? We Need A New Model
For theater, as we know it, to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple...
Your Community’s Superpower? Its Libraries
In a country where nearly every iota of our psyches and our physical spaces has been captured for the purpose of generating a profit,...
When Evidence-Based Reasoning Can Lead Us Astray
We should not assume that motivated reasoning, or all other biased thinking that involves ignoring high quality and relevant information, can only lead us...
This Artist Has 30 Million TikTok Followers. Can He Now Make It In The...
With over 30 million followers on TikTok alone, Rodriguez has developed a following that has even extended to the outside world. Considered merely by...
Seattle Museum Presents “Harry Potter” Show, But Excises All References To JK Rowling
Explaining the decision in a 1,400-word blog, the museum’s exhibitions project manager, Chris Moore, brands Rowling a ‘cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity’. - Spiked
The Books Being Turned Into Plays
“I love the way that one art form can light the flame for another. It doesn’t diminish the original … there’s a whole lot...
Could Apple Buy Disney? The Whispers Are Growing
There clearly is no buyer like Apple, which is sitting on $62 billion in cash and cash equivalents and has a $2.8 trillion market cap. And...
American Theatre’s Existential Crisis
The play’s the thing that’s now in danger. America’s love affair with the stage – embodied by Lincoln and fellow presidential theatregoers such as...
New York’s Highest Paid Theatre Artistic Directors
There are several other ways to look at this. You could look at all the top compensated executives. You could view executive compensation in...
Warner Music Revenues Rose 9 Percent In The Second Quarter
“We succeeded with artists and songwriters across the spectrum of genres and generations, with both new releases and catalog projects.” - Variety
Marvel’s Special Effects Artists Vote To Form Union
Hailing the move as “a major shift in an industry that has largely remained non-union since VFX was pioneered during production of the first...
Is There A Literary Canon Today?
Despite all the claims made for it, the literary canon does not make you morally better, nor does it provide any special insight into...
Istanbul’s Flashy New International Museum Masks Erdogan’s Contempt For Artists
In a cruel twist, Istanbul Modern and Turkish art is all too easily recruited as an aid to Erdoğan’s ambitions on the world stage....
Even Really Successful Writers, Actors, Designers, Can’t Make A Living In The Theatre
Actors who book multiple plays a year. Writers with rave reviews. Award-winning designers. These people are performing at a professional level while living like...
Movie Theatre Etiquette Has Deteriorated. Why?
The fact that Barbie is so successful means that, for a huge percentage of its audience, this will be their first cinema visit since...
