I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which I launched in 1999. ArtsJournal has never been a news source — it’s a curated conversation: 26 years of gathering the most significant writing about culture and putting it in dialogue with itself. I’m also the co-founder and editor of Post Alley, a Seattle-based writers’ collective and experiment in pluralist civic journalism.
Before founding ArtsJournal, I worked as a music critic and arts journalist — as arts columnist and music critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. I later served as Acting Director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. That background in criticism and reporting is the foundation for everything else: it’s where I learned to ask what’s actually happening, not just what institutions say is happening.
My current work centers on how AI is reshaping creativity, authorship, and the policy frameworks that govern them. I direct the US RAO AI & Creativity Policy Observatory, tracking legislation, litigation, and institutional response across the creative sector, and I consult with arts organizations on business model evolution in a period when the structures built to support creative work are badly out of sync with current conditions. I’ve also been part of producing and strategy teams for projects including the Spring For Music orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall and the Ojai Music Festival — work that keeps the analysis grounded in how things actually get made.
I trained as a pianist and hold a master’s degree from Juilliard; early in my career I was artist-in-residence at the Central Conservatory in Beijing. I’ve taught at USC Annenberg and Claremont Graduate University and spoken at conferences across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Diacritical is where I think out loud — testing the ideas that run through everything else.
I speak regularly at conferences and with institutions grappling with these questions — about AI and creativity, the economics of cultural infrastructure, and what viable models for the future might look like. You can reach me at mclennan@artsjournal.com.