Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
London Film Festival Reports Largest Audience In Ten Years
Figures published by the BFI said attendance across both free and paid-for in-person screenings and events at London venues increased by 92%, with 49% of tickets...
That Idea Chimps Could Randomly Type Shakespeare? Naaah!
The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per...
Milwaukee Symphony Music Director To Step Down
Ken-David Masur's career highlights with the MSO include overseeing the introduction of more than 100 works to the orchestra — 33 of which are...
LA’s Vibrant Gallery Scene Seems To Be Collapsing. Why?
With alarming regularity, galleries all over Tinseltown have been closing, reducing their footprints, or decreasing their programming. “Hiatus” is a frequently heard word and...
Brexit Is Killing Britain’s Classical Music Industry
The prime minister is facing calls to urgently cut the red tape blocking travelling singers and bands from touring the continent, with campaigners attacking the government...
A Surprising Number Of Conductors’ Children Are Becoming Maestros Themselves
What we are seeing here is not a conspiracy of podium nepotism but a diverse and largely hidden transmission of a musical function by...
David Salle Amplifies His Work With AI
If the alpine backdrops and empty suits of “New Pastorals” seem skewed, vaguer and flatter even than the oblique combinations Salle usually stitches together,...
Quincy Jones, 91
Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good Morning: The Bay Area has long had a thriving theatre scene, rich in new work. But theatres are falling by the dozens now,...
This Week’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Measuring success when it comes to art has aways been problematic. Sales numbers hardly tell the real story. Attention has become the...
How Should we Measure Art?
Pre-internet, the lines were pretty clear about the binary relationship between artist and audience. Artists created and audience consumed. In today’s digital world, the landscape is fluid—we create and express our identities by what we choose to share online. Sharing, or curating what we encounter both online and in the real world, is perceived as a creative act. In the online world, art doesn’t become activated until people decide to “do” something measurable with it.
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: There are growing calls for a fundamental rethink of the structures that underpin New York's cultural life. "In its early days, the...
The Internet Has Fractured Culture So Much, The Cultural References Don’t Work For Everyone
Considering the way that many recent novels reference recent, niche cultural fragments most relevant to an incestuous class of urban media professionals, future generations...
What Made Dorothy Parker So Potent:
For such a self-professed grump, she never left a reader hanging after a seemingly desultory setup. There was always a reward. And the jokes...
International Protests At Restructuring Of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery
More than 200 Russian curators and art historians, both in the country and in exile, have written an open letter claiming that Moscow’s State...
Where (And How) The International Book Market Is Growing
A recent Nielsen BookData and GfK Entertainment report on global book sales for the first eight months of the year shows “rising revenues in fiction, while sales of...
Is A New Generation Of Theatre Critics Around The Corner?
The 1950s undoubtedly gave us some of the most significant critics in history, but there’s no value in being intimidated by them. Golden generations are...
A Call For Systemic Change In NY’s Cultural Structures
Anyone paying attention to recent testimonies of artists, cultural workers, and leaders of arts organizations in New York City Council hearings to discuss the...
Cautionary Tale: How The Market For A Popular Artist’s Work Collapsed After His Death
The story of Scott Burton is a story about how fragile, mutable and, to some degree, arbitrary art history is. It illustrates how an...
Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier and the Opera Bastille To Close For Years Of Renovations
The closure of the almost 150-year-old edifice, one of the architectural jewels of Paris, will be followed by the closure for renovation of the opera’s...
Comcast Suggests It Might Spin Off Its Cable Channels
“We are now exploring whether creating a new well-capitalized company owned by our shareholders and comprised of our strong portfolio of cable networks would...
Story-Telling Is Integral To The Success Of Doing Science
Eventually, I would learn that stories are not just a way of communicating science; they are intrinsic to science, actually part of doing science. -...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Just what is the obligation of an arts organization to participate in civic life? Former League of American Orchestras' CEO Jesse Rosen...
The New (Old) Soundtracks Of The TikTok Generation
Musicians are "benefiting from the capricious, catholic taste of a generation of listeners who came of age with access to nearly the entire catalog...
Troubled Royal Danish Ballet Picks A New Leader
The company announced on Thursday that Amy Watson, a California-born dancer who joined the troupe in 2000, would serve as its next artistic director. - The...