Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Artistic Touch: Work Feels More Real When It’s A Bit Fake
I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel...
Dance Companies Respond To Anti-DEI Trump Efforts: We’re Not For Sale
"The response of these dance leaders reinforces my belief that the Trump administration’s move to suffocate diversity in the arts is ultimately doomed to...
Bots Sucking Up Data Are Straining Wikipedia’s Servers
Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation's bandwidth used for downloading multimedia...
Director Of The National Museum of African American History and Culture In DC Put...
Kevin Young’s leave came two weeks before Trump issued an executive order calling for the elimination of what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”...
London’s West End Ticket Sales Plateaued In 2024
SOLT’s update on attendances for 2024 shows that 17.1 million attended performances – the same as in 2023. When compared with 2019 – the...
Barcelona Is Transforming A Giant Eyesore Coal Plant Into A Creative Hub
Like Battersea, Barcelona’s plant is set to undergo a radical transformation into the new Catalunya Media City—a cutting-edge hub for digital arts, technology, and...
AI Expert: Why AI Won’t Take Over Creative Writing
As a professor of computer science who has authored hundreds of works on artificial intelligence, including AI textbooks that cover social impact of large language models,...
Is Museums’ Social Media Use Dying?
While most of the 100 museums in the list grew their social media followings over the past year, this is despite almost all of...
Detroit Opera’s “Cosi” As AI
“He’s actually a replica of what we see in the tech industry,” Yuval Sharon said. “There’s a messianic belief that we must transcend our...
Museums As Medical Therapy Prescriptions
Years after the pandemic sharpened issues around mental health, the practice has boomed, with doctors prescribing visits to museums from Montpellier to Massachusetts as a complement to more...
What We Could Learn About Accommodating Climate Change From Frank Lloyd Wright
“The man-made building heighten the beauty of the desert and the desert more beautiful because of the building,” Wright wrote in To Arizona. “A dream,...
Why Did Hollywood Stop Making Conspiracy Thrillers?
Works like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) were rife with anxiety about the country’s future, unsure if change...
Republican Bill Targets Public Broadcasting Business Models
The “No NPR and PBS Act” would simply prohibit funding of either network. It mirrors a bill Ronny Jackson introduced in March 2023 that says federal funding...
Yuval Noah Harari: Truth Is Expensive, Information Isn’t Truth
When information is in a complete free market, the vast majority of information becomes fiction, illusion, or lies. This is because there are three...
How Some Books Thrive Without Viral Marketing
Giving away books for free might seem counterproductive, but it’s one of the best ways to get readers invested. Once they finish one book,...
How Leonard Bernstein Changed The Orchestral Canon
Initially, there was a lot of excitement in the press—the first American at the helm of one of the great orchestras! But the tone...
When To Trust Your Gut
“Trust your gut”, “be yourself” or “less is more” are aphorisms that contain much truth, while also being prone to catastrophic misinterpretation. - The...
Are Books — Finally — Obsolete?
More and more I have the sense of dealing with a technology that’s finished, that’s out of keeping with the times, by which I...
BMG Music Earned $1 Billion In 2024, Spent $263 Million On Buying Catalogs
BMG generated EUR €963 million (USD $1.04bn) in annual revenues in 2024, up 6.4% YoY or up 8.1% YoY on an organic basis. - Music Business Worldwide
The Kennedy Center’s Social Impact Initiatives Aren’t Just DEI, They’re About Figuring Out The...
I’d argue that the reason might have gone beyond a commitment to equity, diversity and social justice. It might have been an investment in...
Hugh Jackman Signs Up For Affordable Theatre
Audible Theater is teaming up with Together, a new accessible-theater initiative led by megastar Hugh Jackman and superproducer Sonia Friedman, for an eight-week series of...
Trump Signs Executive Order On Concert Tickets
The order directs the Federal Trade Commission to more rigorously enforce existing law governing the use of bots that help scalpers scoop up hot...
What Would Happen To NPR And PBS If Republicans Cut Their Funding?
NPR can weather the funding cut, its document predicts, thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress...
The Historic Buildings Lost In The LA Fires
It's been almost two months since the Eaton Fire destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena, including several noted historic and cultural landmarks like this...
UK TV Exec Warns That AI Companies Are Extracting £125bn From Creative Industries
Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out,...
