Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Humanities Have Sown The Seeds Of Their Own Troubles
If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines...
Global Movie Box Office Down 5 Percent In 2023
“Given that we lost 50% of production time in 2023, the anticipated 5% year-on-year decrease in 2023 is not indicative of a declining interest...
ARTnews’ 25 Art Works That Defined 2023
Each year, countless new artworks are made and historical ones come into sharper focus as events in the art world and beyond give them...
Wikipedia’s Assault On History
"What we need, what I’m going to establish, is an ever-expanding phalanx of Wikipedia editors to create, reframe, and defend these pages, which are...
It’s Getting Even Harder To Sell Books
In 2022, less than half a percent of books even cleared 100,000. But this is the financial model on which the publishing industry operates:...
So Generative AI Can Write. But Surely Our Poetry Is Worth More Than That
Poets should not be threatened by the fact that every person with internet access can now create the poetic equivalent of hotel art. Although...
The Met Opera’s Siloing Problem
"This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost...
Washington Post Theatre Critic Peter Marks Retires. And Theatre Suffers Another Blow
The discourse about critics in the theatre has been so mindlessly hostile for so long that most of the time, the sensible thing for...
Deepfakes Are Scary. But “Cheapfakes” Are All Around Us
Long before generative AI became widely available, people were making “cheapfakes” or “shallowfakes.” It can be as simple as mislabeling images, videos, or audio...
Alex Ross’ Review Of “Maestro”
“Maestro” is a complete enough achievement that there is no point in dwelling on what it might have done differently. What’s most significant is...
Cyberattack Wipes Out British Museum’s Digital Presence
On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. - Public Books
Odd? More Than 1,200 Scientists Are Now Publishing New Research Papers Once Every Five...
In 2022 alone, 1,266 non-physics authors published the equivalent of one paper every 5 days, including weekends, compared with 387 in 2016. The accelerated...
Huge Gender Pay Discrimination Suit Against Disney Moves Forward
Disney in 2019 was hit with a suit accusing it of “rampant pay discrimination.” The case cleared a major hurdle Dec. 8 when a...
Controversy Over White House “Nutcracker” Video
The clip drew heavy criticism on Fox News and in The New York Post. It was shocking to see something as innocuous as “The Nutcracker”...
As Disney Turns 100, Looking At Its “Problematic” Movies
Recent Disney films like the animated “Strange World,” with its gay teenage protagonist, have become cultural flash points. But “Pocahontas” prompted a full-blown fracas. - The...
Mozambiqan Uses Dance To Critique His Country
Born the year after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, Panaíbra Canda, 47, has used his art to offer searing critiques of his...
We’re Distracted. So Now Watching A Movie Seems Like An Accomplishment Equal To Reading...
You know what watching a movie felt like to my easily-distracted hamster brain? It felt like an accomplishment. It felt smart. It felt like...
Uh-Oh: The Spotify-cation Of Books Is Coming
The “The Long Tail” was that a slew of niche content creators would prosper on the internet. That has proved illusory for most of them. It’s...
The Storytellers Shaping American Stages
What we have witnessed on the American stage over the past three decades is the emergence of what is now multiple generations of playwrights...
Wier Harmon, 57, Seattle Impresario-In-Chief
“His innate belief that we’re better together — whether that’s through civic discourse, music, theater or any of the magic that happens in the...
The Theatre Entering Public Domain This January
In the world of theatre, this means that not only are vintage stage works no longer subject to royalties, but they can be repurposed,...
Why LA’s KUSC Now Has The Largest Audience For Classical Music In The Country
"There’s an openness and curiosity about ideas here. We’ve always been interested in what’s new, what’s next, and what’s the way forward. That shows...
Web Publishers Fear Google Search’s New AI Will Kill Their Traffic
While Google says the final shape of its AI product is far from set, publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose...
Artistic Censorship? Mostly Not…
"No one is stopping the artist from making art about anything that they want... But artists who make a living from their work are also entrepreneurs,...
State Of The Music Industry (And Trends Going Forward)
Post-pandemic trends that will grow the market most: a) the rapid rise of AI, and B) the rise of the consumer-creator. Consumer-creators transformed photography...