Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Author Declares Culture Dead, Publishers Still Printing Books
W. David Marx diagnoses 25 years of creative stagnation in a new cultural history. Presumably the irony of launching a fresh cultural critique about...
Amazon’s AI Authors Lack What Writers Need Most: Attitude
Machine-generated novels and coloring books are flooding the marketplace, but they're missing literature's secret ingredient—artistic ego. Turns out readers might actually miss all that...
AI Art’s Predictable Problem: The Cliché Machine Cranks On
As algorithms churn out endless variations on tired themes, human artists are discovering their secret weapon isn't perfection—it's the beautiful, messy unpredictability that no...
Justice System Meets Its Deepfake Moment
When seeing is no longer believing, Canadian courts face an existential crisis: how do you prove what's real when reality itself can be manufactured?...
The Remarkable Art In A Building The Federal Government Has Marked For Sale
What would happen to the murals is an open question, as removing them may prove difficult. Advocates for the building fear that without protections...
The Wrong Way To Popularize Classical Music
In execution, this theory works very simply: Don’t change the music; change the way you deliver it. Do the opposite of what institutions are...
The Real Battle For The Smithsonian
Americans argue about the Smithsonian far more than we would if only its possessions mattered. When our museums of record tell us a story,...
Science Peer Review Journals Are Being Swamped By AI Slop
For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they’re...
Napa Art Museum Selling Its Estate Because Of Financial Pressures
The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa has listed its 217-acre estate for $10.9 million, less than a year after announcing a...
Snubs In This Year’s Oscar Nominations
The overlooking of the Good Witch was truly Wicked. Then again, crowd pleaser Wicked: For Good got basically nothing overall, so maybe it’s time to reconsider that...
La Scala Finished 2025 With Record Box Office
La Scala closed 2025 with record ticket sales of over €40 million (+7.3% compared to 2024). Added to this is the record revenue of...
Hollywood’s “Woke” Era Has Emphatically Ended
For anyone fantasizing about Hollywood as some liberal bulwark, though, the 2024 election brought that idea to an abrupt halt. The industry’s era of...
Will The Met Opera Sell Its Chagalls?
New York’s Metropolitan Opera is facing a serious financial crunch, and may sell two beloved Marc Chagall murals to help fill the gap—but if it does, it will...
Hundreds Of Artists Warn About AI Slop
Around 800 artists, writers, actors, and musicians signed on to a new campaign against what they call “theft at a grand scale” by AI...
The Messy Details Of Extracting Washington National Opera From The Kennedy Center
Extracting the endowment after 15 years of operating under the auspices of the Kennedy Center will take more work—and a lot of lawyers. “It...
San Francisco Ballet And “Anticipatory Obedience”
Trot out the national anthem, the flag or a John Philip Sousa march, they believe, and it’s like a free exclamation mark to whatever...
Women-Centered Fantasy Is Fueling The Publishing Industry
Women are rewriting the rules of sword-and-sorcery, trading testosterone-fueled quests for romance-driven adventures. Publishers are discovering that dragons plus dating equals dollars—who knew female...
Philly Art Museum’s Rebrand Needs a Rebrand (And Might Get It)
Nothing says "we nailed it" quite like forming a task force to fix your fresh new identity while quietly showing your chief marketing officer...
Trump Takes Aim at New Deal Murals
Because nothing says 'making America great again' like erasing the last time we actually invested in artists. Depression-era public art programs apparently too woke...
Writers vs. Machines: The John Henry Complex Returns
ChatGPT has writers channeling their inner folk hero, hammer in hand. But as Stephen Marche notes, we've been dancing with technological muses long before...
Why Movies Launch And Music Drops
A key reason why it’s now more complicated to promote an album than, say, a theatrically released film, is the ephemeral, immaterial nature of...
Afghan Musicians Fled To Pakistan To Escape The Taliban. Now Pakistan Is Chasing Them...
The rhythms that resonate in wedding halls, concert stages and apartment blocks are falling silent, as the Pakistani government pursues a wave of expulsions...
The Crisis In Humanities? The Business Model Doesn’t Work
Fundamentally, the state of the humanities and liberal arts reveals a widening conflict over the “value” of higher education – with increasingly corporatized universities...
As The Old Starchitects Die, Maybe We Shouldn’t Replace Them
The "starchitect" was a figment of media attention, drummed up to answer our interest in celebrity, and our exaggerated expectations of what might be...
Alabama Library Board Cuts Funding To Library That Wouldn’t Remove “Handmaid’s Tale”
The Republican-run Alabama Public Library Service Board voted to withhold roughly $22,000 in state funding from the Fairhope Public Library, citing the library’s failure...
