Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
David Brooks: Why AI Won’t Replace Us
Over the past few months, I’ve become an A.I. limitationist. That is, I believe that while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children...
Science Fiction Is Chockablock Full Of Aliens. But “Alien” Is So Hard To Comprehend,...
“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, The Possibility of...
Amapiano – Can The South African Dance Music Craze Go Global?
In Zulu, amapiano means “the pianos,” or “piano people,” and the genre’s name refers to its origin as a jazzy variant of house music—at parties around...
Why Are Published Editions Of Under-represented Composers So Riddled With Errors?
Some inaccuracies were very obvious, while others needed more detailed detective work, and only became apparent as we got to know the music more...
Inside Philadelphia’s Thriving Mural Culture
“There was this idea that, OK, industry and maybe some people left this city, so now it’s our playground." (the city’s population declined from...
AI Is Coming For Us. So What Could Go Wrong?
With all this talk of killer robots, humanity may be overlooking the more immediate dangers posed by AI. - The Atlantic
AI Company Says It Created 100 Million New Songs
An artificial intelligence company in Delaware boasted, in a press release, that it had created 100 million new songs. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire...
San Diego Symphony Delays Reopening Of Its Concert Hall
The reasons for the delay are being attributed to unexpected construction and redesign challenges that have emerged as the nearly 100-year-old hall undergoes a...
Major Consolidation: Frieze Buys Armory Show And Expo Chicago Fairs
Both the Armory Show, which is led by executive director Nicole Berry, and Expo Chicago, led by founder and president Tony Karman, will operate...
Pianist Andre Watts, 77
Watts made his national concert debut when he was 16 years old with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Shortly after, he was...
Record Music Streams In First Half Of This Year
The global music industry surpassed 1 trillion streams at the fastest pace, ever, in a calendar year, Luminate's 2023 Midyear Report has found. The number was...
Here’s How Streaming Broke The Way Artists/Actors Get Paid
“So many of my friends who have nearly a million followers, who are doing billion-dollar franchises, don’t know how to make rent,” Glenn told...
Google’s New AI Search Tool Could Break The Internet In Significant Ways
Sort of like ChatGPT, it pulls information from various websites, rewords it, and puts that text on top of your search results—pushing down any...
Misbehavior: Is Classical Music Teaching Broken?
While classical music has long been mired in cases of sexual abuse, the psychological and emotional abuse experienced by many young musicians is harder to pin...
SAG-AFTRA Actors Vote To Strike
With the Writers Guild strike now in its 73rd day, this will be the first time that actors and writers have been on strike at the...
Boring No More: Belgium’s Architecture Boom
The contemporary Flemish architecture is an enjoyably polyphonic architecture, that enjoys all kinds of complexities and contradictions. It’s boom is even more surprising as...
Misbehaving Audiences, A History
"As far back as the ancient Greeks people like Plato were complaining about what he called a vicious theatrocracy, where audiences who were previously happy...
First Pictures: Giant Oak Trusses For Notre Dame Hoisted Into Place
With trusses weighing 7 to 7.5 tons, the delicate operation drew crowds along a bridge over the Seine River and on its banks. -...
Chicago Versus Pittsburgh: Jeremy Reynolds Compares Orchestras
If anything, Chicago’s precision and balance may give it an edge. However, there’s a raw enthusiasm and vim to Pittsburgh’s performances that I rarely hear...
The Five Most Common Delusions Worldwide
One possibility is that “they reflect the common existential issues or dilemmas of living which preoccupy all human beings,” they write. “Another is that...
70 Years Ago Today: Canada’s Stratford Festival Began
The Stratford Festival has come a long way in 70 years but the story of how racialized artists began to get a foothold and...
Appreciating Peter Schjeldahl
Schjeldahl’s best stuff, to borrow something he said about Clement Greenberg, is always “in command of what it omits.” One conspicuous omission is any...
The Reigning Guru Of Pop Music
Some claim that he has “revolutionized pop,” while others argue that he has, as the clickbait-y title of one video essay puts it,...
Eastern Europe Debates The Fate Of Soviet-Era Monuments
Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 once again fueled the debate in different Eastern European countries, including in Latvia and Poland, where imposing Soviet monuments,...
Facing The Truth: The Edinburgh Fringe Is Broken
We’d all known the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been broken for a while now, with prices running out of control. But it’s been difficult to focus...
