Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Reality Of Artistic Success In Canada: “I Still Can’t Pay My Bills”
Molly Johnson has achieved at the highest level in Canada, with the awards to match: “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me,...
Florida’s Attack On Free Speech Casts A Chill
The bill would make it defamatory to claim that someone is racist, sexist, or homophobic based on that person’s religious beliefs. This is, in...
Study: Why So Many Of Us Are Afraid Of Clowns
More than half the respondents (53.5%) said they were scared of clowns at least to some degree, with 5% saying they were “extremely afraid”...
Scientists Figure Out How To Turn Brain Signals Into Images
Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region...
What If You Optimized Your Everyday Life With Algorithms? This Guy Tried It
One of the first things I’d learned about optimization was that something is optimal if it is equal or preferable to any alternative. To...
Will Your Next Radio Host Be An AI? (It’s Already In Testing)
One of the advantages of RadioGPT is that it knows about an artist or a song or about a current event, so it can...
Art On Abortion Removed From Idaho College – It’s Against The Law?
Idaho Code 18-8705 states that public funds cannot be used “to perform or promote abortion, provide counseling in favor of abortion, make referral for abortion,...
The BBC Has A Huge Impact On UK Classical Music. Now It’s Shifting Priorities
The BBC, as the biggest commissioner of music and one of the biggest employers of musicians in the country, has a vital part to...
John Mauceri: “Tar” And The Culture Of Conducting
Fiction or not, the sort of backstage backstabbing depicted in “Tár” is, alas, very real. We conductors do not generally like our colleagues, and...
Wall Street Billionaire Commits Suicide, Leaving Hole In The Art World
“He brought the attitude of a businessman and an entrepreneur to a sector that, as you well know, is much less focused on that...
At Heart, Revising Roald Dahl And Other Childrens Books Is About Copyright
At its core updating Roald Dahl’s children’s books is really about the rights and control copyright grants to authors and copyright holders. Those rights...
Librarians Organize To Fight Book Bans
The conference in New Orleans was equal parts group therapy and war room, as nearly 2,000 librarians from throughout the country strategized on how...
Big Orchestras Are Back In The Pits Of Broadway Theatres
Enormous is right; with more than 80 percent of the show consisting either of musical numbers or underscoring, Sweeney Todd’s 26-person orchestra rivals the 30-person...
The Scourge Of Book Blurbs
Blurbing has always had discontents. In 1936, George Orwell decried the use of blurbs in his essay “In Defense of the Novel.” He feared for the...
Do Slight Regional Variations In Orchestral Tuning Matter?
Reputedly the grand pedagogue Dorothy DeLay had her piano tuned to 443Hz, maintaining that it would make her pupils’ violins sound more brilliant; there...
The Myths (And Problems) With Meritocracy
There is little hope for meritocracy as a theory of distributive justice. The “playing field” isn’t level, there is an oversupply of talent and...
How Is “Lived Experience” Different From Experience?
The idea of ‘truth’ as something subjective may seem odd, but nevertheless it is clear how the notion of lived experience leads in this...
Why Many Musicians Don’t Like “Tar”
While nobody expects Tár to be a documentary, it gets so much wrong that either it’s deliberately distorting reality for the sake of the plot or...
Building A Canon Of Black Writers Of The Past
This re-engagement with Black authors of the past is being led by a fresh cohort of literary tastemakers: younger authors in search of ancestors;...
Why Are Movie Theatres So Bad At Showing Movies?
Now that multiplexes use automated projection, problems fall to house managers, who, in this age of austerity, may be the same overworked employees ripping...
Whales In The Gulf Of Thailand Suddenly Started Feeding In A New Way. Researchers...
Flinders University scholars now believe they have identified multiple descriptions of the behaviour in ancient texts, the earliest appearing in the Physiologus – the Naturalist –...
Climate Protestors Hit The Rijksmuseum
In lieu of splattering protected artworks with illicit liquids, XR printed a large banner depicting waist-deep floodwater in Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” (1642) in...
ChatGPT’s Alternative Facts Of Art History
I have to admit, ChatGPT’s summary of “The Case Against Art History” sounds convincing on first scan. It feels like it summarizes something in...
Cable Companies Are Bleeding Millions Of Customers
The largest pay-TV providers lost a total of 5.8 million net video subscribers in 2022, compared to a loss of 4.7 million in 2021,...
Museums Anxious As Warhol Suit Threatens How Art Is Made
The Warhol foundation has argued that the appeals court decision renders some existing artworks “presumptively unlawful” and “could lead to the removal of seminal...
