Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
American Conductor Quits Post At Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre
“There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening in Ukraine,” he said during a series of interviews over the...
Composer Harrison Birtwistle, 87
Birtwistle's work was widely championed by many notable conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, Christoph von Dohnányi and Oliver Knussen, as well as soloists...
Pianist Radu Lupu, 76
Lupu had retired from public performances in 2019, after several years of canceling many engagements due to poor health, and had not recorded since the mid-1990s....
What’s The Point Of Canceling Russian Artists?
"Cultural boycotting as an acceptable collateral consequence of war is egregious. There’s no reason to discriminate against individuals. Thousands in Russia, as well as...
Ann Hutchinson Guest, 103, Specialist In Dance Notation
Hutchinson Guest was knowledgeable about a number of dance notation systems, which seek to preserve choreography as its creators intended rather than relying on...
Artists, Musicians Seek To Overturn California Law On Binding Contracts
The Free Artists from Industry Restrictions Act would overhaul California’s Seven Year Statute, removing a damages provision that discourages artists from leaving record deals...
AI Is Getting Awfully Good At Writing. This Has Big Implications
It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them...
Great Bookstores: The 130-Year-Old Pasadena Icon
By 1915, Vroman’s could count traveling dignitaries, engineers, scientists, men of finance and New York book editors as customers. Anticipating their requests, the store...
Here We Go Again — Is The Shroud Of Turin Real?
This week sees the release of a new film, Who Can He Be?, in which David Rolfe argues that, far from the shroud being a definite...
We Praise Creativity. But We Shy Away From It
Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent...
The Netflix Of Theatre? An NYC Theatre Gives It A Try
The pitch is to build something like Netflix or Spotify, where members pay an affordable monthly subscription fee in exchange for access to all...
Why Long Wharf Theatre Had To Change Its Business model
If Long Wharf remained, fundraising would be necessary for capital needs for a complex it did not own and that was not easily accessible...
So Globalism Is Dead You Say? Think Again
International data flows surged as the pandemic sent in-person interactions online. The annual growth rate of international internet traffic roughly doubled in 2020. But that was...
Amazon CEO Teases Big Things Ahead For Amazon Video
“We have more invention in front of us in the next 15 years than the last 15 — and our team is passionately committed...
How The Restitution Of Africa’s Art Stalled
More than half a million such objects—by some accounts, more than ninety per cent of all cultural artifacts known to originate in Africa—are held...
Digital Avatars – The Future Of Music Tours?
May 2022 sees the latest technological advances in musical immortality when Abba return to the live stage after a 40-year absence. But this time...
On Being An Art Critic In A Weird Time For Journalism
There doesn’t seem to be a widespread, clear understanding of the distinction between journalism and criticism in the New York art scene. - Hyperallergic
Somehow, We Decided There’s No Truth. But We Need To Return To The Idea
If truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy...
The International Dance Community Has Mobilized To Help Ukraine
The war in Ukraine has hit the tightknit ballet world hard, and dancers have responded with an unprecedented storm of activism. - Washington Post
How The Internet Is Recording Ukrainian History
Archivists and librarians around the world have been working to catalogue thousands of websites that hold pieces of Ukraine’s past and present, ranging from policy papers...
How LA Shaped Amanda Gorman As A Writer
"The first event I went to was at the L.A. Times headquarters. I was so blown away. They had journalists there, and honestly,...
Los Angeles’ Role In American Literature
Until the middle of the century, its most visible work was crafted by outsiders from the East or Europe, bewildered by what they perceived...
Are We Finally Done With Prestige TV?
Mundanity and profundity—these were key to the 21st-century boom in what critics call “prestige TV,” during which the onetime “vast wasteland” (as Federal Communications...
Minutes? Hours? Who Needs Them? We Need A New Time Measure
Weeks, days, hours, minutes—especially minutes—are just more mechanisms for keeping humans in thrall ultimately based on astronomy, astrology’s lesser sibling. In the globalized information...
Department Of Untruths: Careful Who You Call A Liar
We should hesitate to call someone a liar because we are not privy to other people’s motives or states of mind. That a statement...
