Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Muppets Were On Top. Then Decades Of Bad Business Decisions Toppled Their Popularity....
The characters have survived a cruel decade defined largely by false starts, aborted projects and creative in-fighting. - The Wrap (MSN)
Enormous Challenges For Disney’s New CEO
The entertainment industry is in flux, and Disney will need someone with a deft hand if it is to survive and thrive. The business...
Something Is Not Working In Sacramento’s Arts
This struggle, we have found, applies across the board and includes live music venues, theater groups, performance arts, galleries, and does not discriminate between...
An Ambitious Project To Document Dance
The ambitious project was five years in the making and culled street dance resources from a wide-ranging array of sources spanning mediums. - Fjord Review
Crypto Investors Pay $300K To Create Gold Trump Statue
At 15 feet tall, the statue of President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a...
Critics Hate Proposed Plans For British Museum Spruce-Up
New security buildings in the grounds of the British Museum would look "too flashy" and resemble "a shop and wine bar", opponents to the...
Netflix CEO Goes To Testify Before Congress; A Culture War Ensues
He ended up spending much of his time before the Judiciary subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights pushing back against accusations from...
Michelangelo And Titian: A Contemporary Odd Couple
The two men couldn’t have been more different. Titian was a painter while Michelangelo, though renowned both as a painter and a sculptor, saw...
Bruce Springsteen’s Protest Song In The Age Of Digital Spread
What distinguishes Streets of Minneapolis is not just its fidelity to the tradition of the protest song, but its mode of circulation as a...
Amazon Pulls “Melania” From Movie Theatre After Cheeky Marquee Promotion
It all started with a joke on a movie marquee: “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. ‘Melania’ starts Friday.” - Seattle Times
Testing Trumps Claims About Closing The Kennedy Center
One is that the center needs major upgrades. That is true. The other is that those upgrades require full closure of the entire campus...
Why Boys Are Worse At Reading At Every Grade
Test score data presents averages. Many girls struggle to read, and many boys excel at it. But overall, boys are about three-quarters of a...
Washington Post Decimates Its Arts Staff In Paper-Wide Layoffs
While a list of all those who've lost their positions is not yet available, multiple arts and culture reporters have confirmed the layoffs. -...
Philadelphia Museum Of Art Reverses Its Disastrous Rebrand
The decision, it said, reflects “the recommendations of an interdisciplinary task force of museum trustees and staff, which examined the process and rollout of...
Hollywood Unions Express Concerns About Netflix’s Warner Buy
“Both proposed transactions raise significant issues that impact stakeholders across the media sector, including our members,” the DGA’s statement read. - Deadline
Judge Stops More Changes To Displays At George Washington’s Philadelphia House
It orders “no further removal and/or destruction” of the site “until further order of the court.” That would appear to cover other parts of...
New Exhibitions Are Upending The Ways We Look At Indigenous Art
Somehow, modernist aping of Indigenous models got told as a story of increasing originality, while Indigenous adaptation of Western models was seen in terms...
How Imagineers Reimagined Burned-Out Altadena’s Community Centers
After last year’s Eaton Fire tore through town, incinerating community infrastructure and scattering residents across the region, the importance of such places has grown...
Too Close To Home: Philip Glass’ Lincoln Symphony
The specific outrages Lincoln recounts—lynchings, burnings, mob executions—belong to his era. But his insight is structural. The deepest danger of mob law, Lincoln explains,...
How Miss Piggy Became A Star
A sow in opera gloves would have been a decent gag in itself, but it soon became clear that the character was destined for...
Lessons From The Adelaide Festival Meltdown: Arts Governance Has A Ways To Go
Australia’s arts and cultural sector still has much to learn in terms of fiduciary duties and duty of care, risk and crisis management, communication...
Did Plato Espouse Ideas Leading To Totalitarianism?
In his massive The Open Society and Its Enemies—published just before his return to Europe in 1945—Popper in effect identifies Plato not just as the...
Copyright Wins: Meet The Judge Who Presided Over The Anthropic/Writers Case
Winning legal copyright battles may force tech companies to curb their blatant piracy. But copyright alone can’t halt AI’s advance. - AI Humanist
How The Arts Sector May Be Misreading The AI Revolution
"The sector is responding to AI as if it were a tool to be adopted responsibly within existing organisational life, often through skills development,...
The Challenge For Disney’s New CEO: Become The Face Of Disney
Since Walt Disney first created the company, the CEO has been a highly visible presence not only in Hollywood and on Wall Street, but...
