Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Essentialness Of The Traditional Arts Review
Reviews are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the...
France’s Culture Minister To Go On Trial For Corruption
Rachida Dati, 59, who has publicly outlined her ambition to become mayor of Paris in 2026, was charged in 2019 on suspicions she lobbied...
US Senator Proposes Anti Money-Laundering Bill For Art
The bill—titled the Art Market Integrity Act—would amend the Bank Secrecy Act to require art dealers and auction houses to comply with anti-money-laundering (AML) and...
Benedict Cumberbatch: Hollywood’s Epic Waste Problem
“It’s a grossly wasteful industry. Think about set builds that aren’t recycled, think about transport, think about food, think about housing, but also light...
Arvo Part At 90
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pärt has found a way to speak across boundaries of culture, creed and generation. In the world of contemporary...
Are We Now Defining Ourselves By Who/What We Hate?
Descartes had a famous dictum about the constitutive powers of the thinking self: I think therefore I am. Could it be that, today, I...
New AI Tool Helps Researchers Fill In Missing Letters And Words In Ancient Roman...
Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing. -...
Can Burning Man Survive Financial Hardship?
Despite its explosive popularity over the years, in 2024 Burning Man fell short of its fundraising goals and saw a reduction in ticket sales....
Maybe AI Slop Will Cure Us Of Our Internet Addiction?
Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary,...
Understanding Popularity Through Taylor Swift’s Song Construction
Swift is increasingly taken seriously in the halls of academia. A number of universities offer courses dedicated to Swift, but typically not to her...
Why, After Years Of Progress, Have Women Playwrights Lost The Spotlight?
The low representational numbers for women are difficult to square. By various measures (including the numbers of women graduating from degree programs in the...
In The Age Of Facial Recognition, What Does Privacy Even Mean?
No one knows exactly how the system obtains its matches. There is an entire field in AI known as “mechanistic interpretability” that is attempting...
American Library Association’s New Plan: Focus On Advocacy And Activism
The plan addresses national policy, library legislation, and local connections. “While libraries serve as a cornerstone of democracy the world over, we operate within...
The Enduring Allure Of Puzzles
The problem with a competitive approach to puzzles is that you take what is intended as a soothing and distracting pastime and quietly hitch...
The Prolific Writer Phenomenon
Prolific writers are simultaneously envied and dismissed, admired and snarked about. There is the sense that a writer can write too much, that whatever...
Idea: Replace NEA, NEH With A National $5 Campaign?
 Through small contributions from Americans who care about their museums, arts organizations, and libraries, a national fund could be built that provides steady, apolitical...
NPR Will Reduce Its Budget By $8 Million To Help At-Risk Local Stations
National Public Radio will cut its budget by about $8 million in order to provide that money to member stations most impacted by last...
Republicans Propose Renaming Kennedy Center’s Opera House After Melania Trump
The proposal was introduced by Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee as part of a spending bill for the Department of the Interior,...
Harvard Publisher Abruptly Cancels Journal Issue Devoted To Palestine
On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher...
Report: Arts Programming Is Difficult To Find On Media Platforms
The report notes that "programmes about the arts, international issues, religion and belief were not readily available, prominent or discoverable, particularly on the platforms...
So Far, While The US Government Is Cutting Arts Funding, States Are Maintaining Theirs
“We’re in an uncertain fiscal environment for state governments overall, but it is encouraging to see that 29 states increased their funding for their...
Senate Hears Authors Protesting Wholesale Ingestion Of Their Work By AI Companies
“Today’s hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history,” Sen. Josh Hawley said. - Washington Post
Universal Music Files For A $500M Public Share Offering
UMG and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square have an agreement that Pershing Square can request UMG to list in the U.S. if it sells at...
As Broadcast Audiences Decline, Should Broadcast Shows Be Easier To Find On YouTube?
The UK government should intervene to make public broadcaster (PSB) content easier to find on YouTube, the regulator has urged, as it gravely posits...
What To Make Of Dave Hurwitz’s Classical Music Schtick?
Who knew that it was possible to talk in this educated but roughhouse way about Mozart, star sopranos, Herbert von Karajan? Or that the...
