Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Musicians Versus The Streaming Companies – Something’s Gotta Change
The artists’ demands are threaded with anger and anxiety over the degradation of creative labor. But the musicians face long odds. Despite solidarity among...
What If An AI Bot Curated The Whitney Biennial?
"A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different...
How To Think About Racist Statues That Have Been Taken Down
To date there are no large-scale programs or comprehensive models for dealing with defaced or removed monuments. However, the museum and heritage sectors —...
The Birth Of Newsletters, 600 Years Before Substack
"Newsletters began in mid-fifteenth-century Venice. Subscribers would receive handwritten letters twice a week rounding up interesting events. Sixteenth-century merchants used similar news sources to...
AMC Theatres Loses $567 Million
Revenues at the world’s largest exhibition chain topped out at $148.3 million, down 84.2 percent from the year-ago period, while the company logged a...
How, And Why, Barry Jenkins Went Through With Ten Episodes Of ‘The Underground Railroad’
"There was only one time when he seriously thought about quitting. The project … had just been announced, in the fall of 2016. Within...
Short Opera Videos Are One Pandemic Innovation We Should Keep
Over the past months we've gotten "a range of short films that showcase top talents in American opera, highlight contemporary composers and recruit other...
Hollywood Is Hiring Rage Coaches To Teach Awful Execs Some Self-Control
"How to be a better boss is a question that has come under new scrutiny in Hollywood thanks to some high-profile examples of spectacularly...
For First Time, No Individual Artists Are Finalists For Turner Prize
"The choice of collectives reflects the fact that few artists have been able to publicly show anything over the past year. It prompted judges...
New York Launches $25 Million City Artist Corps
"The program … will give money to artists, musicians and other performers to create works across the city, whether through public art, performances, pop-up...
La Scala Begins Construction On New Building
"The foundation stone has been laid for new building, which will be constructed to the rear of the existing structure." The project, designed...
One Of London’s Leading Theatres Says It Will Keep Live-Streaming Productions Permanently
" Kwame Kwei-Armah told The Guardian the pandemic had changed theatre forever, with the livestreaming of plays becoming 'hard baked' into how the industry...
Investors Are Buying Up Vast Catalogues Of Music
Over the last year, dozens of music's biggest artists have cashed in the rights to their entire catalogues of songs, netting tens or hundred...
The Museum As Weapon Of War?
The Brutish Museums argues, persuasively, that the corporate-militaristic pillage behind Europe’s “encyclopedic” collections is not a simple matter of possession, but a systematic extension...
The Enduring (And Contemporary) Art Of The Tartan
Far from being a dyed-in-the-wool slice of historic Caledonian kitsch, tartan design is very much alive and well in the 21st Century – as...
The Hucksterism Of Selling Culture In The 20th Century
Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games. How much pure hucksterism...
The Perils (And Uneasy Promise) Of Artificial Intelligence
“Some glitches are mild, like an Alexa that randomly giggles (or wakes you in the middle of the night, as happened to one of...
Power Of The Press? From Op-Ed To Federal Writers Project Bill In Congress
Like his forebears under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, David Kipen rolled up his sleeves and went to work. He started writing letters...
A New York City Ballet Principal Writes About Returning To The Studio
Russell Janzen: "This is the longest I have danced with someone else in quite some time, and after running it in this first...
The Diversity of Performing Arts Audiences: Weighing Organizational Factors and Business Decisions
The pursuit of audiences and artists who come from, and speak for, various subgroups can enrich any shared arts experience aesthetically, emotionally, and socially....
Disinfectant Theatre: CDC Says Super-cleaning Surfaces Isn’t Necessary. Theatres Are Doing It Anyway
This aspect of theater hygiene has turned out to be little more than — well — hygiene theater. Experts have been saying since last...
Trying Very Hard To Ask Bruce Dern Interview Questions
"'Wait a minute, let me tell you about this first,” says Bruce Dern, embarking on what I think is his fifth discursive anecdote in...
UK Will Fast-Track Visas For Anyone Who’s Won An Oscar, Grammy, Golden Globe Etc.
The U.K. Home Office revealed on Wednesday that people who have won any of these awards will be able to skip the endorsements previously...
The Heated Battle Over ‘Hooked On Phonics’ (Yes, There Was One)
"As strangely ho-hum as Hooked on Phonics feels now, it was once a juggernaut in the educational space, selling hundreds of millions of dollars'...
Whoosh — Chicago Arts Scramble To Get Back In The Game
The city had most all of its nonprofit arts constituencies in line like eager petitioners: as soon as the mayor spoke, they hit “send”...