Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Theatre-Seat-Maker-To-The-Stars
“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he...
Czech Conductor Libor Pesek, 89
Pesek was a Czech conductor with a solid if unspectacular career when in 1987 he was appointed chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic...
David Remnick: Remembering Peter Schjeldahl
Peter was a man of well-developed opinions, on art and much else. He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some...
The Alluring Aroma Of Old Books
There are old books and there are old books. Sometimes opening one that I have innocently purchased for 3.99 plus postage can feel like...
Calculating The Moral Value Of The Distant Future
Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how...
Reconsidering The Music Groupie
The argument for me as groupie is more complex than the definition of the term. Groupies were women who hung around bands. They were...
Audiences For TV Soap Operas Are Falling Off
One of soap operas' major problems in recent times has been a failure to bring in new fans on top of their existing ones....
Fear Of Cancel Culture Makes Me Wonder…
The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that assumption? - The Atlantic
Why Aren’t Dallas Audiences Returning After COVID?
Audiences are being more selective, according to researchers and arts leaders across the region. Some are scared to gather in crowded indoor venues. Others...
Why Peter Schjeldahl Mattered As A Critic
Schjeldahl was a belletrist as a writer — a once fashionable, now vaguely disreputable genre of fiction, poetry and essay writing with an acute concern for...
When The Stories We Tell About History Change… An Existential Crisis
Though the true past is fixed and unrevisable, stories about that past are not. Palaeontologists understand these stories as theories, but their audiences often...
What Scientists Are Learning About Language From The Grammar Of Artificial Intelligence
The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired...
The Growing Book-Banning Coalition
Predicated on “protecting our kids” from the “scourge” of sexual progressivism, the anti-democratic right is forming a powerful religious alliance against secular liberalism. -...
How Social Media Is Changing How We Engage With Art
The internet has always had an expansive capacity to reach some pretty strange and inexplicable places, but with the ever-evolving nature of social media,...
Criticize The Show You’re In? What Does It Accomplish?
Is the mainstream media the place to debate the process of theatremaking? Or does honesty, however it cuts, break the compact of the rehearsal...
When An Actor Criticizes The Show They’re In…
I’ve had artists and members of the theater community reach out after a review — yes, even ones where I didn’t care much for...
Is The Live Entertainment Capital Of America Really Branson?
Few places in the country host a professional show-business destination as quirky and expansive as this Missouri mountain town a few dozen miles north...
Chess Computers Are Now So Dominant, Are Humans Even A Factor In High-Level Play?
In an era when chess engines entirely dominate the game—when they’ve so monopolized human players’ thinking, strategy, and preparation that chess has, in certain ways,...
The Viral Tyranny Of TikTok
This new era of instant, inexplicable attention has also come at a price. In interviews with more than three dozen TikTok creators, many noted...
How The Denver Art Museum Removed Columbus From Its Stories
It is easier to understand objects created during the current downfall of Columbus and those who followed him, if you can see the art...
Dance As A Model For “Life Lived In Time”
If we look at the world through Parson’s eyes, we find that dance is all around us, in people stretching or hugging or standing...
Inside The Makeover Of The New York Times Business
“Is the Times always going to be fundamentally a news company expanding into these ancillary tech products?” she asked. “Or is it trying to...
Inspiration Or Exploitation? The Winning Literary Strategy
It turns out that the strategy of exploitation prevails in fiction at large. Knowing the topics of just a few books by an author,...
Crisis In UK Theatre Schools
Drama Centre London stopped taking new students in 2019 before shutting. ALRA, one of England’s most established performing arts institutions, suddenly collapsed. Musical Theatre...
How Media Covered The Philadelphia Art Museum Strike (And Why It Matters)
What is the arts writer’s beat? Are we still on it when we take a stand about something happening inside a major arts institution,...
