Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
At 93, Is Gerhard Richter Our Greatest Living Artist?
That much will certainly be made clear in a massive Richter retrospective opening this month at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Comprising some...
Gertrude Stein’s Language Experiments Were Considered Difficult. But Let’s Reconsider
“Devotees of her cult professed to find her restoring a pristine freshness and rhythm to language. Medical authorities compared her effusions to the rantings...
American Education Is In A Desperate State. It Is Failing Its Students
We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not...
AI Has Been Trained With What’s Online. Not All Knowledge Is Online
These systems may appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege dominant epistemologies (typically Western and institutional) while marginalising...
Broadway Musicians Authorize Strike
The musicians' most recent contract expired August 31, 2025. Since then, the union has been trying to achieve a new contract that includes increased wages,...
Was L’Affaire Jimmy Kimmel A Lesson For The Importance Of Late Night TV?
Amid all the headlines about falling ratings, production cutbacks and monetary losses, it's easy to forget that late-night TV programs have historically occupied a...
How AI Could Change The Way We Listen To Music
As AI becomes more embedded in music creation, the challenge is balancing its legitimate creative use with the ethical and economic pressures it introduces....
How To Understand What We Used To Call The Idiot Savant
In the past (autism became a diagnostic category only in 1943), the ‘idiot savant’ was a paradox, who confounded categorisation because there was no...
Online Sales Are Changing The Market For Native American Art
An estimated one-third of Navajo Nation members make and sell art for a living, and in Zuni Pueblo, as many as 85 percent of...
Smithsonian Museums Have Now Shut Down
The Smithsonian manages 21 museums around Washington, DC, and in New York, as well as the National Zoo and 14 research facilities. It had previously...
What Happened to Kevin Costner?
The Oscar-winning director and actor with the most iconic American screen presence since Gary Cooper is now brawling with his castmates, getting sued by his crewmembers...
My Letter To AI Tilly On The Meaning Of Being An Actress
Tilly, you never had to be 14, so I’ll tell you what Google can’t. It feels like your soul gets a broken glass enema....
Zadie Smith Ponders The Point Of Essay-Writing
My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In the nineties, this was what we called...
Libraries Scramble To Replace Industry’s Biggest Book Distributor
Given the complicated nature of library wholesaling and its existing position in the market, Ingram is well positioned to pick up a sizable chunk...
Scientist Used Sensors To Discover How Pianists’ Touch Changes Timbre
A team led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya at the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. has provided the first scientific evidence showing...
Will AI Create A Permanent Underclass?
The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear...
Are We Having The Wrong Debates About The AI Actress?
The question isn’t whether the future will be synthetic; it already is. Our challenge now is to ensure that it is also meaningfully human....
Meet America’s New Poet Laureate
“You can’t speed-read a poem,” he explains. “You have to read it, hear the sounds, the rhythms, reread it, not be in a hurry....
Jean Nouvel’s New Museum In Paris Upends The Traditional Gallery
Nouvel’s latest movie: a new home for the Fondation Cartier, a private art foundation established in 1984 that’s dedicated to the accumulation, display and...
Why, With Broadway’s Stresses, Revive A Long-ago Flop?
Put simply, “Chess,” first produced in the U.S. in 1988, didn’t work on Broadway. So remounting the show, even though it’s become a cult...
Backlash Grows Against Comedians Who Participated In Riyadh Festival
Of course, some will argue that performing in authoritarian or oppressive countries is a means of reaching the masses; opening up art to those...
The Controversial History Of The Union Jack (And Why It’s Prominent Right Now)
Its meaning and symbolism are under the spotlight in debates often producing more heat than light. Is the increasingly widespread public display of the...
Judge Rules Music Publishers Can Sue Anthropic Over Copyright
US District Judge Eumi Lee on Monday ruled that Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO can press forward with claims that Anthropic bears legal responsibility when users of its Claude chatbot generate copyrighted...
Librarian Fired For Refusing To Remove Books, Wins $700,000 In Court
A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from...
How Artists Are Incorporating AI Into Traditional Work (And Ideas)
While A.I. speeds along, upending any number of careers and lives, some in the art world have chosen to embrace it while also, in...
