Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
A Surge Of International Interest In Moden African Art
The value of auction sales of contemporary and modern African art surged by 44% to a record high of $72.4m (£65.6m) last year, according to...
Are You Selling A Product Or An Experience?
A hotel room lease is still a service with or without a guest. “Art, however, does not exist until it occurs in an audience,...
Damien Hirst Burns His Work After Making NFTs
The artist told buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection to choose either the physical artwork or the NFT representing it. Those who...
Pent-Up Demand For Museums? Here’s What We Know
We have been tracking pent-up demand for cultural entities over the course of the pandemic. Has this demand been realized? What might this mean...
Jann Wenner’s Towering Accomplishment
Few American magazine editors of the 20th century can match. Like Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Henry Luce of Time, Life, and Fortune, Clay Felker of New York,...
Something New: Viral Jazz?
Much truer to the spirit of viral jazz is the musician who fully inhabits a given platform, allowing it to inform their creative process...
Why Didn’t Gaming Criticism Catch On?
Experiencing a game is weirdly different from experiencing a TV show, a movie, a play or a book. They are, to use a drab...
The Modern Orchestra Is An Exquisite Piece Of Technology. Its Operating System Could Use...
The institution of an orchestra was built for another time. In an age of attacks against institutions, perhaps it's necessary to tweak how the...
An Idea Isn’t Copyrightable. But Art Is
Fundamentally, artists must realise that in copyright terms, their creative ideas are worthless until those ideas form part of a tangible piece of work...
Philadelphia Museum Of Art Strike Enters Third Week. Here’s What’s Driving It
“It’s kind of a generational movement that I see here. I see it as something coming out of a young workforce that is mostly...
Why Superfans Treat Disney Like A Religion
To Deborah DeGiovine — and others around the world — visiting a Disney park isn't just a summer vacation. It's the site for important...
Appreciating The Singular Talent Of Angela Lansbury
Lansbury’s ability to be both broad and subtle, larger than life yet unmistakably human, was indispensable in introducing the world to “Sweeney Todd: The...
Riding AI Image Generators Down A Rabbit Hole Of Bizarre Pop Culture
After a while I started to realize that this was more than just fun and more than just horror: Stable Diffusion is birthing a...
Inside Orange County’s New Museum
Los Angeles-based Morphosis, which was founded by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, designed the structure to have a "gradient of architectural intensity, from...
The Point Of Poetry?
If you asked a hundred contemporary poets working today to define what they meant by poetry you would find yourself orbiting a hundred differing,...
Even TS Eliot Couldn’t Make A Living By Writing Poetry
Not even great poets can live off their poetry — “The Waste Land” sold only about 330 copies in its first six months —...
The New Economy: Warner Brothers TV Makes Deep Cuts
The studio is cutting 26% of personnel, a total of 125 positions, across scripted, unscripted and animation. - Deadline
Why It Always Comes Down To Good Versus Evil
The ideas of “Good” and “Evil” are premised on some concept of “Value.” That is, “Good” and “Evil” can only be real if some...
Worried About The Robots Taking Over? It’s More Subtle Than That
Don’t worry about superintelligent A.I.s trying to enslave us; worry about ignorant and venal A.I.s designed to squeeze every penny of online ad revenue...
Can Data Predict Hit Songs?
Spotify metrics we studied — including acousticness, danceability, duration, energy, explicitness, instrumentalness, liveness, speechiness (a measure of the presence of spoken words in a song), tempo and release year — were not strong predictors of the song’s...
How Status Drives Cultural Change
To maintain their positions, the normals conform to social conventions, even as they aspire to higher status. Individuals’ decisions about when to switch from...
Petition Asks For Repatriation Of The Rosetta Stone
Launched in September, the campaign urges Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to submit an official request for the return of the stone and 16...
Angela Lansbury, 96
Lansbury was the winner of five Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit”...
Guerrilla Artists In Toronto Turn Derelict Parts Of The City Into Critique Of The...
Ahead of Toronto’s municipal election in late October, plaques like those normally found in an art museum have sprung up across the city, in...
The Booker Has Brought Back The Short-Form Book
How refreshing it was to see the Booker prize take another turn last month – putting the short in shortlist, as it were –...