Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
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...
Our Connection Between Athletics And Writing
The intensity of the workout was necessary to take her out of her head, so that she could write from a different place—“an embodied...
London’s Gallery Commune Proves Sharing Is Caring
Ten years in, Condo's cooperative model has emerging dealers singing Kumbaya while actually making money. Who knew that playing nice could be the art...
South Africa Pulls Venice Biennale Show, Proving Art Diplomacy Dead
When your culture minister cancels a Palestinian grief exhibition for Venice, you've officially entered the realm where politics trumps artistic integrity. Two scholars aren't...
Museums Having Identity Crisis, Film at Eleven
Another year, another promise to "redefine" art institutions. But this conversation with curator eunice bélidor and administrator Dejha Carrington might actually cut through the...
How The Cleveland Orchestra Prepares For A Concert
It says a lot that this orchestra is confident enough to let a critic see it rehearse from start to finish, on the record....
Here Are The Grants The New National Endowment For The Humanities Has Given
The National Endowment for the Humanities on Thursday announced $71 million in new grants, including nearly $40 million to classical humanities institutes and civic leadership programs...
How We Lost The Art Of Paying Attention
Most of us are by now familiar with the broad mechanisms of the “attention economy” – the hijacking and monetising of consumer attention through...
More Trump-Taunting Art Placed On The National Mall
A massive replica of a birthday note and crude drawing signed with the typed name Donald J. Trump and a “Donald” signature that was...
The Death Of The 20th Century Mono-Culture (And What It Means)
The implications for the battered-and-bruised entertainment industry are obvious. The impacts on our culture are just starting to fully materialize, but will be more...
Christmas Day Broke All Records For Streaming
Nielsen says streamers logged 55.1 billion minutes on streaming services on Christmas, breaking the previous high — set on Christmas in 2024 — by 3.9 billion minutes....
Matt Damon: Movies Now Repeat Plots “Three Or Four Times” In Dialogue Because People...
Because viewers give a “very different level of attention” to a movie at home versus in a theater, Netflix wants to push the action...
The Trump-Kennedy Center Regime’s Odd Notion Of An Arts Business Model
The notion that unstated corporate aesthetic preferences should determine what the public encounters as art — indeed, what counts as art at the nation’s...
