Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Basquiat Was A Subversive Artist. Now He’s Just A Brand
Sanitized and caricatured by corporate marketing schemes, Basquiat’s work has been defanged. Today, Basquiat the artist has become Basquiat the brand. - Jacobin
What Guston’s Cartoon Klan Tells Us
Guston didn’t know what to say about the Klan or about racial violence, except that he knew to fear it as a Jew, and...
The Conflicts Of Ego It Takes To Be A Writer
The act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and...
LA MoCA Imports New Chief Curator From Tate Modern
An L.A. native, Clara Kim has been senior curator of international art at Tate Modern since 2016, where she organized an acclaimed survey of...
Edmonton Symphony Music Director Departs For Germany
What everyone agrees on is that this very talented and still very young conductor will have the kind of opportunities in Germany that simply...
Study: Male Film Critics Dominate
The report, titled “Thumbs Down: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters,” shows that in early 2022, males continue to outnumber their female...
Would We All Be Better Off without Philanthropy?
Philanthropists rarely make the large, unrestricted gifts that the receiving institutions really want, and so the two parties bargain: over the purpose and the...
The New Energy Behind Street Dance
“Dancing is a form of escapism for some of us,” Diamond Hardiman, a 28-year-old dancer from Chicago, tells me. “So it’s about being real...
How Ukraine’s Most Prominent Novelist Is Recording The War
“I think everybody should do what he can do best for the country. The snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for...
Director Guillermo del Toro: The Current State Of Movie-Making Is Unsustainable
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance...
Report: Only 22 Percent Of UK Music Festival Headliners Are Women
Two major projects were launched in 2017 aimed at getting more female acts on stages - ReBalance and KeyChange - after a BBC study had found around 80% of...
Italian Police Find Missing Titian After Two Decades
Discovered by a Turin branch of the cultural heritage unit, a subsidiary of the Italian state police known as the Carabinieri, the 16th-century work,...
Not What You Thinks: How The Internet Is Destroying Us
We can at least say of the oil economy that its environmental damage, and consequent destruction of the human world, is only an epiphenomenon,...
Untethered: Our Lives Without Cables
"If the trend towards mobile phones continues, and there’s little reason to believe it won’t, landline phones could soon become an endangered species, much...
How Are We Supposed To Talk About The Future?
I too grew up imbibing common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and...
Schick Happens: Portrait Of The Master Percussionist
“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people. So the question is, what does an aging body,...
Ukraine’s Best Filmmakers Are Recording The War
The country's leading filmmakers, including Oleh Sentsov, Valentyn Vasyanovych, Serhiy Myhalchuk and Olga Beshmelnitsyna, are in the trenches, often literally, documenting Russian atrocities and...
Just Switch It Off: Why Great Numbers Of Australians Have Quit The News
Research from the University of Canberra found that heavy news use dropped from 69% in April 2020 to 51% in January 2021, while those expressing...
A Deconstructivist Guide To The Universe
The emergence of deconstructivism – an ungainly portmanteau of the mid-to-late twentieth-century philosophical movement, deconstruction, and 1920s Russian constructivism – suggested that the avant-garde's...
An Influential Literacy Educator Makes An About Face In How To Teach Reading
It may not inspire political campaign ads the way critical race theory does, but the debate over how to teach children to read —...
In The Age Of TikTok, TikTok At Cannes Hits Some Speed Bumps
Filmmakers from 44 countries submitted films to the competition, all between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. The top prize was shared between...
Aristotle’s Principles Of Storytelling Are As Fresh Now As Were Then
You may not agree with everything Aristotle says, but consider his ideas, and see if you don’t think they’re as fresh and brilliant today...
When The Artist IS The Content
Rather than the “death of the author” heralded by French novelist and philosopher Roland Barthes in the 1960s, are we now witnessing its counterpoint—a...
New Opera’s Hot Right Now. But Where Are The Funny Operas?
This isn’t to say opera shouldn’t be political — though I’m thoroughly skeptical of its ability to tackle social issues in a way that...
The Neuroscience Behind Music That Gives You Chills
It’s called “frisson,” and it’s the reason why music from artists featured on a recently released, scientifically-backed playlist of songs that researchers claim are...
