Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Classically Cool Frick Re-emerges
If the museum experience is now more stylistically bifurcated — the Beaux Arts past on one side of the complex, a sympathetic but unapologetic...
Trump Administration Wants Congress To Cancel Funding For PBS, NPR
The plan is to request that Congress rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If Congress agrees, that will...
Why Trump’s Sculpture Garden Project Of American Heroes Is A Big Deal
Effectively killing the NEH in its current form and then reallocating its money to build the National Garden of American Heroes—the centerpiece of Trump’s plans to...
Stem Or Humanities? It’s a Disastrous Distinction
In fact, neither one of these labels names a particularly coherent group of fields. STEM covers endeavors as different in their workings and aims...
Do We Even Know What Classical Music Is These Days?
Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates about the field’s ongoing lack...
National Geographic Says These Are The World’s Best Book Towns
By definition, a book town is “a small, preferably rural, town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated… available to everyone…” Today, there...
Inside The Rise And Fall Of YA Fiction
The rise of more inclusive YA has felt as much like a seismic shift as “The Hunger Games” did back in the day. It’s...
How To Stop Students From Being Merely Cogs In Machines?
The trick is convincing administrators, parents, and students that the best way of getting an education in independent and creative thinking is through the...
Teachers Don’t Want Students To Use AI. But Increasingly Teachers Are Using AI
Is it fair to use A.I. to grade student essays, if you’ve prohibited students from using A.I. to write them? School leaders are grappling...
What We Need To Do To Save Universities
The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics....
How Spotify Is Ruining (Not Saving) Music
While music discovery used to be a social event, now most of us cower to simply accepting whatever the Spotify algorithm feeds us. While...
How Learning To Improvise Freed My Mind
As a classically trained flutist, I expected to feel unmoored without structure. But improvisation has made space for a freedom I didn’t know I...
How AO Scott Morphed From Writing About Movies To Pondering Poetry
For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology...
LA Philharmonic Makes Its Coachella Debut
The Los Angeles Philharmonic led the charge into their first Coachella performance on Saturday with the "Ride of the Valkyries," helmed by Venezuelan conductor...
Will AI Save Or Kill Journalism?
The more closely you look at the profession of journalism, the stranger it seems. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than fifty thousand people...
The Strange Limbo Of TikTok In The New World Order
TikTok already existed in a kind of limbo before last week, but now its strange state of in-betweenness is intensified: it is both alive...
Is This Vermeer’s Last Painting?
Until recently the Kaplan painting had been considered to have been completed between 1670-72. That dating has now been revised, with Wheelock stating it...
Time To Refocus The NEH And NEA?
This is where the N.E.H. and N.E.A. would serve Mr. Trump well: not only correcting “woke” excesses, but also providing an elite counterpart to...
The Prado Has Enlisted AI To Count People In Paintings
The Prado hopes that actually knowing exactly how many people are in these crowded scenes will help us better understand these paintings, and how...
Tranquil Music Of Intensity
Hania Rani, 34, has become a shooting star in a genre of pop-inflected minimalist music often referred to as neoclassical, or alt-classical... “It’s not...
Data On The Relationships Between Arts And Building Community
Communities with greater access to arts organizations have: 33% more volunteers supporting nonprofit organizations, 7% more active voters who are registered and eligible for voting, 3%...
A Musician Wrote To The New Kennedy Center Director. He Responded
“I’m not sure why he chose to react to my email with such hostility, but I think it’s important for people to read this...
A Case For Trump’s Smithsonian Order On Depicting History
Trump's order asks to avoid “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort” and “rewrite” America’s history and “inappropriately disparage” heroes, and to foster “unity”...
Can This Man Save Iconic Atlantic Records?
The world of the all-controlling label is changing, and Atlantic Records—historically among the top three labels—has struggled to launch hot new global superstars. Atlantic’s...
Has The Met’s Pivot To Contemporary Opera Fizzled?
Signs of financial catastrophe are on the horizon. Gelb has twice dug into the Met’s anemic endowment, withdrawing up to $70 million out of a...
