Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Broadway Attendance Down. But What Does It Mean?
The anecdotal evidence, gleaned from social media and private conversations with industry leaders, suggests a variety of challenges — lingering fears of the coronavirus, the...
Broadway Box Office Slips Again. Did It Open Too Soon?
Big picture: the 27 shows currently running grossed $19.66 million together last week, with 168,169 butts in seats. That’s a 11% box office drop...
Royal British Columbia Museum To Close Indigenous Galleries, “Decolonize”
The Becoming B.C. gallery, which focuses on the story of European settlement in B.C. and has been widely criticized for pushing a colonial narrative, will...
Why “Mistakes” In Language Are Actually Progress
Someone in my line of work hears around him a linguistic feast, where many just hear the English language going to the dogs. -...
The Impossibility Of Translating
To put it less politely, translation is a bitch. - Granta
Edinburgh Fringe Once Again Feeds The West End
There remained no shortage of quality work presented at the fringe, but its own aesthetic had changed over this time, contributing to making it...
Why Museums Should Cut Down On The Art In Storage
Museums should downsize storage for commercial, environmental, social and ethical reasons. Post-pandemic with their revenues ravaged, they need to take a hard look at...
How Shondaland Became An Empire
In Shonda Rhimes’ renewed pact, the bullet points specify that Shondaland will now be, as Rhimes puts it, a “one-stop shopping” source for Netflix...
A Reason To Invest In The Arts In The South?
A recent study found that a person living in the South received only $4.21 in arts and culture funding from philanthropy, compared to the national average...
A First: Big Museum Opens Its Entire Collection To Visitors
Normally, only some six to ten percent of collections at major museums around the world, the rest kept in closed storage depots. That will...
Now AI Is Formulating Hypotheses Scientists Haven’t Thought Of
Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural...
Why Are AI Data Sets Disappearing From The Internet?
All together, about a dozen AI datasets vanished—hastily scrubbed by their creators after researchers, activists, and journalists exposed an array of problems with the...
How Korea Became A Major Cultural Exporter
Once streaming services like Netflix tore down geographical barriers, the creators say, the country transformed from a consumer of Western culture into an entertainment juggernaut...
This Year’s Booker Prize Winner:
Booker judges pronounced Damon Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries,...
DC City Council Approves Two New Arts Commission Members Over Objections Of Its Chairman
The controversy comes as the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities has dramatically reshaped its policies to focus on diversity and equity and to broaden...
Jazz Guitarist Pat Martino, 77 — Overcame Amnesia To Perform Again
In 1980, brain surgery left him with no memory, but he painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three...
The Cultural Revisionism Industry
Over the past few years, a certain genre of media has found opportunity in debunking false conceptions of the semi-recent past and meditating on...
Rehabilitating Chuck Close
Where Close’s work ultimately lands in the canon of American art will serve as the art world’s first test case for how an artist...
What Do Hybrid Performances Look Like After COVID?
It may be counterintuitive, but the consensus view is the best way to produce the emotional intensity of a live performance is to create...
JackTrip: Solving The Internet’s Latency Problem For Musicians?
“We now have 60,000 users and we just hit the 100,000-hour mark of people making music on our platform. We’re excited to be a...
Orchestras Continue Progress On Diversity During COVID
With racial sensitivities heightened since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, classical music groups nationwide have increasingly highlighted BIPOC performers and composers. - Dallas...
Mark Zuckerberg As Cultural Director Of The Internet? Er…
Though the term “metaverse” suggests a fully articulated sci-fi realm, Zuckerberg is using it to glamorize a network of virtual and augmented reality apps...
How To Memorize Something Complex? There’s A System For That
To earn the title of Grand Master of Memory, one must be able to memorize a 1000-digit number in one hour. The next hour...
High School Teacher Abruptly Cancels Play After Students Complain About Script
Students complained of a script they felt made light of sexual assault victims and contained inappropriate language and stereotypes that made cast members uncomfortable....
Justice Department Seeks To Block Giant Publishing Merger
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, “If the world’s largest book publisher is permitted to acquire one of its biggest rivals, it will...
