Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Book-Tok Has Revolutionized Book Marketing. Now It’s Going To Publish Books, And…
Called 8th Note Press, the proposed entity seems to sit at the intersection of a major publisher and a site like Amazon or Goodreads,...
How AI Is Training On The Work Of Artists It Will Replace
There's a model with Stability AI that utilizes a large data set called LAION. It contains 5.8 billion text and image data pairs. And...
Sorry, But London Is No Longer A Classical Music Capital
London achieved its musical status in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, adding two new symphony orchestras and drawing a surprised endorsement from Arturo...
Inflamed. Impertinent. Insightful: How D.H. Lawrence Read Literature
Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the...
The Rise Of AI-Generated “Adjacent” Culture
There’s a lot of talk of “innovation” in Silicon Valley, a term that usually means destroying things that work in favor of things that...
How Translated Books Have Found A New Generation Of Readers
There seems to be a transgressive quality to some translated fiction. Is that appealing? “That genre of ‘messed-up’ books has just exploded on TikTok.”...
Classical Music And The Streaming Wars
"I can’t put myself in the unisex Crocs of a young person exploring classical music for the first time, but Apple Classical strikes me...
Why Hollywood Is At The Precipice
Hollywood has a history of treating evolving consumer habits first as a threat to theatrical dollars and then as a tool to be co-opted...
How “Emo” Music Took Over The Popular Culture
From the start, the word was often deployed as a slur, a way of mocking bands for dealing in “soft” subjects, like heartbreak. To...
The World’s First Poet (From 4,200 Years Ago) Still Resonates on Today’s Issues
Besides being a poetic masterpiece in its own right, ‘The Exaltation’ bears the distinction of being the first known work of literature that was...
Climate Vandals Deface Portrait Of King Charles In Scotland’s National Gallery
Following the protest, a gallery for modern portraits was closed for the remainder of the day. The rest of the institution, however, stayed open....
NYT’s Michael Paulson Talks About What He Found About The State Of Theatre In...
Theater has some particular vulnerabilities — it’s a niche art form, and a lot of nonprofits pride themselves on developing new work, which means...
What’s So Seductive About That Urge To Censor?
The reasons can vary, but from fig leaves on sculptures to TV versions of classic films, when a work of art has a wider...
The Wrong Questions About AI And Art
When it comes to AI-generated images, the question “but is it art?” has always escaped me – didn’t we sort that out at least...
Those Studies On What Makes You Happy? Not Really…
Almost 95 percent of the experiments testing the happiness benefits of mindfulness, exercise, and engagement with nature, in particular, lacked big enough sample sizes...
The Analog Dancer: Mark Morris As Teacher
His teaching is the least known aspect of his work — yet it may be the most important. While there have been seasons when...
Polish Radio Station Replaces Midday Host With AI Host
Basia, the country's first AI-generated radio host, has taken over an hour of middays every Saturday through Sept. 2 on the station, which published...
AI Says Its By Raphael. Art Historians? Not So Much
Researchers hope their experimental use of AI will put to rest a decades-long debate about the origins of the painting, known as the de Brécy...
How GoodReads Messes With Authors’ Psyches
The world-ending devastation of the first scathing review. The righteous indignation at the first three-star review. No one understands me. Are these people even literate? Am I even literate? It’s...
The GoodReads Review Revenge
A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous...
Musicians Have The Same Issues As Actors, Writers. So Why Aren’t They Also On...
All the fears and complaints that Hollywood actors and writers have are a reality for musicians and songwriters, too. Yet the rockers, pop singers...
At This Point In Our Culture, What Is History For?
Ironically, the education of more and more people in the United States has led to an expansion of potential audiences for quality, and progressive,...
Two Art Vandals Who Glued Themselves To A Raphael Painting Fined $1,600 Each
The Dresden prosecutor’s office announced on July 21 that the two activists, Jakob Beyer and Maike Grunst, would be fined €1,500 ($1,600) each for...
New Ways To Use Old Instruments
New music for old instruments is, of course, nothing new. Nor is the engagement by composers with varying degrees of historically informed performance. But...
Bay Area Musicians Fight Back Against The Gig Economy For A Living Wage
With each musician guaranteed $200 for an hour-long set, “we’ve presented about 400 concerts featuring 500 musicians, reaching about 18,000 listeners." - San Francisco...
