Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
A Fluxus Pioneer Explains It All
On June 21, Nye Ffarrabas turns 90. She is "in the midst of several new Fluxus projects". When asked whether she had any advice...
How BAM Expanded Its Audience During The Pandemic
“BAM isn’t just for one audience. We were consistently sold out this season and more often than not had a standby line. That’s because...
Renee Fleming – Keepin’ On Keepin’ On
A good run indeed. At 63, an age when many if not most opera singers have retired, Fleming is still keeping extremely busy —...
In Which I Attempt To Convince You Of The Value Of Reality TV
For many Americans, watching so-called lowbrow, “mindless” reality TV — the type of content that doesn’t further our intellect in any tangible way —...
New AI Breakthrough Makes Startling Pictures, Raises Questions About Creativity
It's leaps and bounds ahead. It raises immediate questions about how these technologies will change how art is made and consumed. It also raises...
How Much Responsibility Do You Have To Be An Informed Citizen?
There are two reasons why it is unclear whether positing a personal responsibility to be informed improves our information practices. - Psyche
Jaron Lanier: A Non-Obvious Way To Fix Social Media? Groups!
The point is that the people in the groups know one another well enough to take on the pursuit of trust and quality, and...
Donor Run Amok: A Museum Sells Its Soul
Welcome to Long Beach. Here at Cal State University, Kleefelds in the Kleefeld at the Kleefeld are the new norm. Disturbingly so. It’s a...
Nijinska: The Choreographer Stuck In Her Brother’s Shadow
As a private entrepreneur without official sponsorship, Diaghilev made his way with an astute combination of connoisseurship and the ability to cultivate an inner...
Radical Reimagining? Safer Neighborhoods Begin With The Arts
It is not just a pretty idea. The UPenn Social Impact of the Arts Project studied New York City in 2017. Their data showed that neighborhoods...
Report Finds “Absurd” Levels Of Government Interference In Museums
The report tracked “astonishing, nearly absurd” cases of political interference at some museums, the commissioners say, and outlines how some museums are poorly run....
Survey: What Artists American Museums Show
Nearly half of all art exhibitions showcased by U.S. museums between 2017 and 2021 were dedicated to less than five percent of a quarter...
What Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Arts Presenters Learned During COVID
Another thing that’s changed “is it turns out we like our neighbors. And there are plenty of communities that are under-represented in our spaces,...
The Value Of “Anchor” Artists
We discovered that at the center of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area is the anchor artist: someone central to their community...
Can Algorithms Be Protected Speech?
Recommendation systems pose difficult questions about what it means to speak, and whether speaking is something that only a person does. How do we...
The Internet As Endless Doom Scroll
It might seem the other way around: that our fleeting attention is the result of an internet that’s unrelentingly feeding us the now. But my...
Stalin – Man Of Ideas
Stalin was a man of ideas, to the point where he thought that by changing the ideas to which people are exposed he could...
The Scoop On This Sunday’s Tonys
There are around 831 eligible voters—and still ballots to be completed and votes totted up. The Daily Beast spoke to three voters anonymously about...
Can Murano’s Struggling Glass Factories Be Saved By Design?
Reversing Murano’s fate would be a monumental task, especially at this pivotal moment when soaring gas prices, caused by the war in Ukraine, have...
A New Way To Pick New Books?
How to reproduce online the serendipity of walking into a bookstore and discovering new books and authors. A new app, Tertulia, launched this week, is...
Is There A Job Vacancy Crisis In The Arts?
The job vacancy rate has been particularly high since April of 2021, when the sector experienced a record monthly vacancy rate of 8.8%. That...
The Evolving Meaning Of Meta
To be meta was to flex your self-awareness for social currency, to demonstrate proficiency in the language of smirky dissociative irony that was the...
Still Grappling With The Point Of Book Reviews
If, in fact, book reviews are on the whole too positive, as some suggest, does this mean that the purpose of book reviewing is...
Australia’s National Gallery Faces $67 Million Hole
The National Gallery of Australia needs to urgently find more than $67 million to protect its $6.1 billion art collection with a backlog of...
Ira Glass Worries That We’re Losing The War Against Disinformation
The US – like many other Western nations – has gone from a place “where it seemed like some sort of consensus was possible”, to a new...
