Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
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...
Debates Around The Saudi Comedy Festival And American Comedians Are Frustratingly Vague
More than any other artists, comedians are alert to how language reveals meaning, and what all the explanations have in common is a maddening...
How Did The Nobel Literature Committee Lose Its Sense Of Fun?
So: a victory for high literature, for inevitability, for oppositional culture, for men. But for the obsessives who have been attending to the saga...
“Mad Max” Director: AI Will Change Art. Technology Always Does
Artificial intelligence, George Miller said, represents “the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image.” “As a filmmaker, I’ve always been driven by the...
In The Current Environment, Is There Room For Truth-Telling Art?
These episodes highlighted the vulnerability of the US’s state-funded cultural sector under an autocratic populist president determined to suppress artistic expression perceived as intolerably...
New Venice Music Biennale Director Spins Another Take On Contemporary Music
The invitation for Caterina Barbieri to lead the Music Biennale gave “a platform to another side of contemporary music that is generally excluded from...
How Contemporary Art Is Taking On Nigeria’s Identity
“Many of these artists deal with the idea that Nigerian culture has to be taken as a multinational and multi-ethnic question, in which artists...
Dozens Of Bob Ross Pictures To Be Auctioned To Help Support PBS
Ross, with his distinctive afro, soothing voice and sunny outlook, empowered millions of viewers to make and appreciate art through his show The Joy of...
