Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Art Of Collecting: Heroes Or Plunderers?
As long as objects have been plundered, countries have called for their repatriation. Yet western popular culture has muted these voices, sometimes expressing anxiety...
Philosophers And Their Obsession With Language
In the 20th century, Western philosophy split into two discourses, each with its own canon and jargon, usually referred to as ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’. Mastering...
Donald Runnicles Closes Out Two Decades With The Atlanta Symphony
Undoubtedly, there will be great guest conductors in our future. But Runnicles created his own two-decade golden age of Atlanta Symphony history, one that...
The Moral Ambiguity Divide: How Gen Xers And Millennials See The World
While Gen Xers grew up with the moral gray areas and disdain for authority, Millennials were raised on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, neither of which would...
There Was That Moment Computers Started Beating Humans At Chess. Now They Will Start...
We’re living a new, much broader Deep Blue moment, when the basic boundary lines between the outer limits of what machines and humans can...
The Arts’ Power To Influence Behavior To Address Climate Change
Diego Galafassi, who researches the role of the arts in sustainability, argues the arts can foster the disposition and imagination required to address the climate crisis. Arts activities...
The Art Of Blurbs (Ads In Hiding)
Blurb, then, is a twentieth-century euphemism for a particular kind of advertisement, one that uses evaluation as a figleaf for a sales pitch. In...
Chicago Opera Theatre Appoints New General Director
Lawrence Edelson founded American Lyric Theater in 2005, building a model organization for presenting and fostering new opera. He also recently concluded a successful...
Striking Writers Focus Anger On Netflix
Demonstrations over the past week have underscored just how much writers have soured on the company. In Los Angeles, Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters have...
Illinois Legislature To Consider Ban On Book Bans
As per the bill, the $62 million of funding that goes to the state’s libraries will only be eligible for said funding if they “adopt...
The Differences Between Non-Fiction In The UK And Non-Fiction In The US
At least on the face of it, the mainstream of US nonfiction is stately, thorough, chronological and substantial; whereas British nonfiction is slant, whimsical,...
Los Angeles Opera, Post-Placido Domingo
“By most criteria, other than audience attendance, the company is in significantly better shape than it’s been in its 38-year history." - The New...
Google’s AI Will Likely Be Quite Boring
As the company moves the technology into more of its products, perhaps the generative AI revolution will turn out to be a lot less...
Hollywood’s Luddites
The Luddites were not some group of fanatics trying to slow the march of history. They were workers trying to protect their livelihood from...
Streaming Music’s Big Bot Fakes Problem
Fake streaming is an industry-wide problem that goes beyond AI-made music. A French study found that between 1 and 3 percent of all music streamed across various...
How We Know What We Know
Simon Winchester worries “that today’s all-too-readily available stockpile of information will lead to a lowered need for the retention of knowledge, a lessening of...
Two Rembrandts, Long Lost, Rediscovered
The original paintings were last seen by the public in 1824, the year they were sold to the ancestors of their current owners, who...
How Immigrants Popularized Classical Music In America
While the United States offered myriad opportunities, it also had its challenges. Classical music in the hinterlands was a relatively new phenomenon and the...
Tony Awards Committee In Emergency Meetings About Writers Strike
The strike’s possible impact on this year’s Tonys, set to air and stream Sunday, June 11 on CBS and Paramount+ from the United Palace...
I’m A Librarian At Rikers Jail. Here’s What I See…
There are parts of the jail system that we no longer visit, because we don’t feel safe there. Other parts have lost library access...
Eurovision: So Deeply Uncool It’s Now Cool?
Do these fans love Eurovision because they enjoy the catharsis of the unabashed release of “bad taste”? Or because they enjoy feeling superior to...
The Enduring Power Of Multicultural Culture
Across the entire geographic and chronological recorded history of human societies, storytelling has enabled different ways of seeing and thinking to be communicated without...
Forget Bromances – Female Literary Friendships Are In
Since 2015, the year female friendship was discovered, book after book about it has been published. - Granta
Nataki Garrett On Trying To Make Change At The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
“When you recognize the potential for something to shift, and you can see the path, then the question becomes, how do you implement a...
Why New York Is The Center Of The Global Art Market
New York surpassed Paris as the global centre of the art market in the years after the Second World War. Now it has been...
