Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
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...
McWhorter: The Evolution (And Pleasure) Of Discovering How Other Languages Work
Partly because I am this strange thing called a linguist and partly because I am the kind of linguist who wants to know a...
David Brooks: Taking Refuge In The Arts
The normal thing to say about such experiences is that you’ve lost yourself in a book or song — lost track of space and...
The Confusing Case Of The Roald Dahl Edits
Despite the indignation of the critics and the high-mindedness of the revisers, the truth is that most of the edits to the Dahl books...
By The Numbers: Oscars Have Made Progress In Diversity
Looking at the eight years before and after #OscarsSoWhite, the USC study found that 8% of nominees between 2008 and 2015 were from underrepresented...
Theatre Curtain Calls Used To Mean More…
The thing is, audiences love to go crazy. It means the tickets were worth it. - NPR
Why MSNBC’s Black Audience Is Soaring
On top of leading Black viewership among cable networks with 173,000 Black viewers on average in February — ahead of CNN’s 105,000 Black viewers...
Jazz Great Wayne Shorter, 89
His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. His sound was brighter on soprano,...
Is “Post-Truth” The Result Of A Common World?
Hannah Arendt argues that while objectivity, as the view from nowhere, might be both an impossible and undesirable aim, there has been ever since...
When Big Brands Steal Unknown Artists’ Work
For the many independent artists who say that work they have posted online — in hopes of attracting paying gigs, or at least an...
Ukraine Commemorates Start Of The War With A Banksy Stamp
On February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian postal service released a new stamp featuring a Banksy mural and...
Katha Pollitt: The Case For Not Censoring Roald Dahl
Did it start out as a few modest tweaks but got out of hand? In any case, there’s a loss in these changes—in vivacity,...
As Small Businesses Collapse, Music Stores Are Closing. This Matters
If we take away music’s “shop window”, it recedes yet further out of view. There is not even the possibility that someone might walk past,...
How Vinyl Records Became Cool Again
Everything the music industry had learned in the twentieth century pointed to vinyl’s demise in the twenty-first. And it’s true that physical formats are...
How “Lord Of The Rings” Was Adopted By Italy’s Far-Right
Although the link between J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic and Italy's far-right is not new, it's a phenomenon that has re-surfaced with new vigor since...
100-Year-Old Historic Toronto Theatre To Be Torn Down
The proposal comes as a rash of other live performance venues have shuttered across the city in recent years. If the project moves forward, theatre...
The Machines With An Unconscious?
Writers, someone once said, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. The whole point of the metaphor was to...
A Reader/Writer Laments: “I’ve Lost The Pleasure Of Reading”
I continue to struggle with an imaginative leap into a world that is entirely not my own. I can’t quite seem to achieve the...
