Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why Do We Have An Instinctive Attraction To Music?
People have relished music for so long that we have evidence, from forty thousand years ago, of humans making a flute-like instrument out of...
How Universities Became Centers Of Liberal Thought
In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense...
The Cultural Debate About Wall Texts
“When curators withhold information about the works and the artists, they are reinforcing their own curatorial approach, which is a contradiction. Decontextualizing and dehistoricizing...
What Musical Variations Can Teach Us About Divergent Creativity
It’s hard to imagine creativity without divergent thinking. How are you being exploratory? How are you being adventurous? A theme and variations is a...
America’s Post-Modernist Architecture Legacy
Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially...
Louvre Discovers $12 Million Ticketing Scam
When officials at the Louvre in Paris suspected a couple of tour guides of reusing tickets in late 2024, they did not expect to...
Tate Modern Serves Frida With a Side of Capitalism
When museums pivot from contemplation to consumption, even revolutionary icons get commodified. Tate's Kahlo experience trades artistic liberation for lifestyle branding—because apparently unibrows sell...
University Gets Cold Feet Over Hot ICE Criticism
When your art hits too close to home, apparently even universities develop sudden institutional amnesia about academic freedom. Victor Quiñonez's immigrant-focused work got the...
The Machines Are Coming for Your Plot Twists
What seemed preposterous in a 1962 novel—story-writing machines—is now Silicon Valley gospel. As AI churns out narratives, we're left wondering: who's really telling the...
African Art Market Caught Between Home and Away
As Middle Eastern buyers flex their newfound muscle, African dealers face the classic dilemma: chase the international money or build local infrastructure first? Turns...
IMLS Makes America’s Grants Great Again
Federal cultural funding now comes with ideological strings attached, as museums and libraries discover their grant applications must suddenly harmonize with presidential vision statements....
When Words Have No Liability
We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively—deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises—while bearing no vulnerability...
The Man Who Thinks The Enlightenment Was A Mistake
Rod Dreher emerged from the conservative blogosphere in the 2000s and won fans with his daily stream of testy opinions and unguarded anecdotal writing....
The Middleware Manifesto: A Proposal for Rebuilding American Culture
That shift from content value to traffic value is what has destroyed the business model for nearly everything we're talking about. I'm calling it a manifesto because that's what it needs to be. Not a lament. Not a white paper, but a declaration of what is needed.
AJ Chronicles: This Week’s Stories — Changing of the Guard
This week there’s a question that connects nearly every story. Who gets to decide what’s real? A viral AI-generated video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt is racking up views. Neither actor consented or was paid. SAG-AFTRA is furious. Lawsuits await. Meanwhile, Tracey Emin is telling young artists to buy
Does Making Art Require A “Writer’s Room”? Or Is It Something Else?
There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived...
What Does It Mean To “Rewire” Your Brain?
Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our...
The Art Of Literary Subversion
The unique power of literary tradition, unlike philosophy or science, is that literature can respond to its predecessors without invalidating them, can contradict them...
The Successor To The Corporation For Public Broadcasting
The wind-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has given birth to a new independent, nonprofit organization that looks to fill some of the...
Australia’s First New City In 100 Years
The masterplan forms one of Australia's largest urban development projects and, once complete, will be the country's first major city built in over a...
America’s Richest Humanities Funder (And Its Implications)
Is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the last best hope for American arts and letters—or is it killing them? - The Atlantic
A Dawning Recognition About AI And Music
Many worry that a kind of “canned” creativity will take over much of what originates from real people today, pushing a broad swath of...
Where The Power Lies: Institutions Versus Networks
Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation...
Scientists Look Inside The Brain Of A Musician While He’s Playing
What happens in a performer’s brain while playing? Traditional brain-imaging tools like functional m.r.i. (f m.r.i.) require subjects to lie motionless in a scanner....
AI Companies Are Eating Higher Education
A.I. companies are increasingly exerting outsize influence over higher education and using these settings as training grounds to further their goal of creating artificial...
