Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Of Racism, Music And Musicology
John McWhorter on musicologist Philp Ewell's new book: "The assumption, then, is that the “whiteness” or “maleness” of any given proposition must automatically be...
Canada Sets New Canadian Content Rules For Streaming Music
Before C-11, online broadcasters were under no obligation to stream any Canadian content. In essence, Bill C-11 looks to put streaming and other Internet...
The English National Opera Does Eurovision
This all feels like ENO letting off some steam. For an hour on a Tuesday afternoon in May, a group of musicians, blissfully under-rehearsed...
From Global Star To… What Happened To Valery Gergiev
Sources close to him report that Gergiev—who, before the war, would drop by the theater three or four times a month—now spends most of...
Survey: Audiences Uncertain About Using AI For Movie/TV Scripts
According to the survey, consumers remain uncertain about how they feel about the use of AI in the entertainment industry, but they’re also open...
Why Buzzfeed And Vice Fail And The NYT Is Thriving
Reversals of fortune are nothing unusual in the news business. But in the last few weeks it’s been gobsmacking to see Vice facing bankruptcy and BuzzFeed shuttering its...
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Understanding Iceland’s Musical DNA
There's a very small population in Iceland, and people tend to do everything. You might be playing in the symphony orchestra in the morning, in...
LACMA Has Become A Contemporary Art Museum
How lopsided has the program been? Of the 11 shows on view at the museum last year, just two centered on historical art. The...
The Case For Making Art In A World Undergoing Transformation
Making joyful art while the world burns is a necessity, especially when that joy comes through deep questioning. My neighbors don’t care that my...
US Supreme Court Rules Against Warhol In Copyright Case
The case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, No. 21-869, concerned the limits of the fair-use defense, which allows copying that...
As Another Round Of News Organizations Shut Down, What’s To Become Of Our Media...
As the ice floe keeps shrinking, watching the cycle play out feels increasingly grim. Online, writers and editors trade condolences, often in lieu of...
The Ethicist: Is A Colorblind “Fiddler On The Roof” Cultural Appropriation?
As I’ve argued before, the habit of reducing the complexities of identity and culture to a matter of ownership is an artifact of our own...
A Month After It Closed Down, Santa Fe’s Center For Contemporary Art Reopens
It was the shuttering of an art space that served Santa Fe for over four decades. Five weeks later, with a board member-initiated fundraising...
Ghost In The Machine: What Andy Warhol Understood About Computers And Art
He was one of the first who saw machines had something to offer to the artistic process. The artistic technique for which Warhol became...
Saudi Arabia Swings For The Culture Fences — The Complicated Blockbuster Pompidou Deal
The comparison for the Pompidou project is the Louvre Abu Dhabi. In that landmark 2007 deal, the UAE paid France €1 billion for a...
How Musical Hooks Embed Inside Your Brain
Much of modern pop could be described as a hook-delivery device: ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga or ‘Shake It Off’ by Taylor Swift, for...
Podcast Producer PRX Cuts 10 Percent Of Staff, Blaming Declining Sponsor Income
With a roster of 124 active shows, PRX has been a steady, albeit low-key, podcast publisher. It had nearly 6.6 million unique U.S. listeners...
On The Internet No One Knows You’re An AI
If a computer system can write code—as ChatGPT already can—then it might eventually learn to improve itself over and over again until computing technology reaches what’s...
The Art Of Collecting: Heroes Or Plunderers?
As long as objects have been plundered, countries have called for their repatriation. Yet western popular culture has muted these voices, sometimes expressing anxiety...
Philosophers And Their Obsession With Language
In the 20th century, Western philosophy split into two discourses, each with its own canon and jargon, usually referred to as ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’. Mastering...
Donald Runnicles Closes Out Two Decades With The Atlanta Symphony
Undoubtedly, there will be great guest conductors in our future. But Runnicles created his own two-decade golden age of Atlanta Symphony history, one that...
The Moral Ambiguity Divide: How Gen Xers And Millennials See The World
While Gen Xers grew up with the moral gray areas and disdain for authority, Millennials were raised on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, neither of which would...
There Was That Moment Computers Started Beating Humans At Chess. Now They Will Start...
We’re living a new, much broader Deep Blue moment, when the basic boundary lines between the outer limits of what machines and humans can...
The Arts’ Power To Influence Behavior To Address Climate Change
Diego Galafassi, who researches the role of the arts in sustainability, argues the arts can foster the disposition and imagination required to address the climate crisis. Arts activities...
The Art Of Blurbs (Ads In Hiding)
Blurb, then, is a twentieth-century euphemism for a particular kind of advertisement, one that uses evaluation as a figleaf for a sales pitch. In...
