Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Messy City, Clean City: The Tension That Makes London London
This distinction between the messy and the neat, the organic and the planned, helps us understand why London so often dislikes modern buildings. Modern...
Reconsidering Gauguin (In Fiction)
Daisy Lafarge’s debut novel, Paul, takes a unique approach to an ongoing question: How, in the age of the #MeToo movement, should we interact with...
A Life Well-Lived: Remembering Lars Vogt
Vogt brought people together in many places and on many levels: at his Spannungen festival in Heimbach, Germany, which became a musical home for...
How Today’s Billionaires Distort And Impede Things We Care About
The great fortunes of today's robber-barons have a vast, distorting influence on our society, bending our most urgent projects away from evidence-based policy and...
Inside Riccardo Muti’s Relationship With The Chicago Symphony
“You are the last orchestra and the most important orchestra where I have been music director. Your memory will accompany me in my heart...
This Summer’s Movie Box Office: Disappointing. Cause: Not Enough Movies
It was the lowest haul since 2001, when summer movies earned $3.34 billion at domestic theaters. The summer season typically accounts for about 40%...
Authors, Publishers Urge New UK Government To Reform Policies On Libraries, EBooks
With the cost-of-living crisis taking hold, the publishing industry hopes Truss and her government will bring in a range of measures to ensure people...
How COVID Changed The Gallery Opening Reception
“If we do three smaller events around an opening, it’s just that much better for the artist and for my team to be able...
The Minefield Of Staging Shakespeare Today
"It is a feeling of being in a minefield where some things are permitted and some not, but you don’t know which, or that...
Tom Stoppard At 85
At 85, he retains, as Daphne Merkin once wrote in The New York Times, a louche glamour, “like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert.” The house...
Has Roger Norrington Finally Unlocked The Mozart Code?
"I’ve tried to play Mozart well for 60 years now. When I started I had little clue. How fast should it go? (There are...
Sundance’s Next Leader
Hernandez, who currently serves as the senior vice president of Film at Lincoln Center, the executive director of the New York Film Festival and the...
The Avant Garde: I Used To Be A Contendah!
An avant-garde likes to present itself as insurgent and radical, yet the logic of the metaphor suggests that a new group will soon be...
What Luck In War Teaches Us About Your Odds In Life
It is not just in war and sport that luck plays such a great part. In our interconnected global economy, every business operates in...
When Goethe’s House Was Destroyed In WWII, Rebuilding Became Controversial
As Goethe later recalled in his autobiography, it was to the house that he owed his literary awakening. It was there, gazing at his family’s...
Canada’s Griffin Prize For Poetry Goes International
In announcing this shift, prize founder Scott Griffin said that Canadian poets are capable of competing on the world stage. “Yes, Canadians will not...
Australia Is Having An Extraordinary Debate On Cultural Policy
‘When you get it right, it affects our health policy, our education policy, our environment policy, foreign affairs, trade, veterans’ affairs, tourism… A nation...
What If Reality Is Defined By Relationships Rather Than Physical Properties?
Quantum physics may just be the realisation that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality continues all the way down to the elementary physical level....
America’s Museums Promised To Diversify. How Are They Doing?
We followed up with several museums on their grand pronouncements from 2020 to see what they’ve actually followed through on, how their plans have...
The Art World (And The Courts) Have No Idea How To Deal With AI...
“While it’s absolutely true that this AI art couldn’t exist if it weren’t trained on copyrighted images and the work of artists, the end...
The Publishing Industry Is Broken
While complaints from junior staffers about crushing workloads and low pay have begun to creep into some industry reporting, publishing veterans are also unhappy....
Iconoclastic Art Critic Charlie Finch, 68
He wrote on whether Black art had grown “kitschy” and whether Cy Twombly was a “fraud.” He defended Jeff Koons, whom he once called...
What’s Behind An Exodus Of BBC Hosts?
"A big one that we've seen in recent months and years is reorganisation at the BBC, particularly in the newsroom. A lot of that...
The Arts Face A Big Mask Problem
Arts presenters "know that some audience members will be deterred by mask requirements at a time when they have vanished from so many other...
In A Land Far Far Away: A Battle Between Three American Orchestras
The competition was intense. In the first pair of performances, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra eked out a slight advantage over the Philadelphia Orchestra in...
