Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
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...
The First AI Magazine (It’s Soulless)
The ability to see something you hadn’t expected is what separates printed products from the internet. It’s why those who love magazines do so...
What We Should Learn From Loss
We fail all the time, in things large and small, yet our biggest failure may be that, as a rule, we don’t understand failure. And...
Canadians Want To Promote Canadian Content. Problem: What Is Canadian Content?
Nobody seems happy. The way the issue splits along political lines feels so incoherent, it’s almost arbitrary. - The Walrus
Public Libraries Have Become… Social Work Agencies?
Vicky Varga, a twenty-four-year veteran of Edmonton Public Library, described how the city had moved toward fully integrating social work into the activities of...
Satire Seems To Be Dead (For Now)
As the world became almost unfathomably strange, many people reacted by demanding seriousness; social and political critics understandably turned very sober. And this too...
In The Age Of AI, Form Seems To Be Making A Comeback
AI-driven image-making—far from heralding some future post-human development—appears to be reviving long-dormant visual strategies that dominated the arts, and art theories, of the past....
The Enduring Allure Of Concert Halls That Make An Architectural Splash
Sydney cemented the idea that grandiose political and architectural ambitions — some would say hubris — can merit the expenditure of much larger sums...
