Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
At Heart, Revising Roald Dahl And Other Childrens Books Is About Copyright
At its core updating Roald Dahl’s children’s books is really about the rights and control copyright grants to authors and copyright holders. Those rights...
Librarians Organize To Fight Book Bans
The conference in New Orleans was equal parts group therapy and war room, as nearly 2,000 librarians from throughout the country strategized on how...
Big Orchestras Are Back In The Pits Of Broadway Theatres
Enormous is right; with more than 80 percent of the show consisting either of musical numbers or underscoring, Sweeney Todd’s 26-person orchestra rivals the 30-person...
The Scourge Of Book Blurbs
Blurbing has always had discontents. In 1936, George Orwell decried the use of blurbs in his essay “In Defense of the Novel.” He feared for the...
Do Slight Regional Variations In Orchestral Tuning Matter?
Reputedly the grand pedagogue Dorothy DeLay had her piano tuned to 443Hz, maintaining that it would make her pupils’ violins sound more brilliant; there...
The Myths (And Problems) With Meritocracy
There is little hope for meritocracy as a theory of distributive justice. The “playing field” isn’t level, there is an oversupply of talent and...
How Is “Lived Experience” Different From Experience?
The idea of ‘truth’ as something subjective may seem odd, but nevertheless it is clear how the notion of lived experience leads in this...
Why Many Musicians Don’t Like “Tar”
While nobody expects Tár to be a documentary, it gets so much wrong that either it’s deliberately distorting reality for the sake of the plot or...
Building A Canon Of Black Writers Of The Past
This re-engagement with Black authors of the past is being led by a fresh cohort of literary tastemakers: younger authors in search of ancestors;...
Why Are Movie Theatres So Bad At Showing Movies?
Now that multiplexes use automated projection, problems fall to house managers, who, in this age of austerity, may be the same overworked employees ripping...
Whales In The Gulf Of Thailand Suddenly Started Feeding In A New Way. Researchers...
Flinders University scholars now believe they have identified multiple descriptions of the behaviour in ancient texts, the earliest appearing in the Physiologus – the Naturalist –...
Climate Protestors Hit The Rijksmuseum
In lieu of splattering protected artworks with illicit liquids, XR printed a large banner depicting waist-deep floodwater in Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” (1642) in...
ChatGPT’s Alternative Facts Of Art History
I have to admit, ChatGPT’s summary of “The Case Against Art History” sounds convincing on first scan. It feels like it summarizes something in...
Cable Companies Are Bleeding Millions Of Customers
The largest pay-TV providers lost a total of 5.8 million net video subscribers in 2022, compared to a loss of 4.7 million in 2021,...
Museums Anxious As Warhol Suit Threatens How Art Is Made
The Warhol foundation has argued that the appeals court decision renders some existing artworks “presumptively unlawful” and “could lead to the removal of seminal...
We Need To Rethink Political Art
Artists are a contentious lot and often downplay or deny that politics has any bearing on art and art making. Other artists fully accept...
Universal Music Posts Record Streaming Revenue, But CEO Calls For New Streaming Model
Even as Universal Music’s chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge lauded the sustained growth of streaming and technology’s ability to connect artists with their fans, he used the company’s...
Impending US Supreme Court Ruling Could Upend The Arts World
Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the...
How Museum Architecture Is Changing
The tension between architectural expressionism and restraint is nothing new. Still, there is a kind of reckoning in the field of museum design with...
Climate Of Fear: Are We Censoring Ourselves In Today’s Climate?
British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that “nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses.” He might have added that no one would...
Artists Organize To Fight Social Media Censorship
“Social media corporations have become cultural gatekeepers with unprecedented power to determine which artworks can freely circulate and which ones are banned or pushed...
Toronto’s Art Gallery Of Ontario Unveils Major Expansion
The expansion is the seventh such effort in the 123-year history of the AGO at its longtime downtown Toronto home. - Architectural Record
How Theatre Deals With Its Roald Dahl Edits
Few seem to have made the leap to how theatre addresses the issue of bringing past works back to the stage, perhaps because such...
How The Pandemic Changed Public Media Finances
The downturn in sponsorship sales that began in 2020 continued for public radio in 2021, while public television bucked that trend. TV stations began...
How Our Personalities Change
For a long time, psychologists saw personality as fixed throughout our lives. This has since been disproven – although personality is relatively stable, it’s far from set in...
