Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Meet Pitchbot – Media Criticism Through Parody
With his account, NYT Pitchbot imagines the Times formula for stories as a kind of wheezing algorithm, a bot churning out contrarian headlines and half-baked hot...
Imagination Is Critical For Learning. So Why Don’t We Teach It?
Studying the imagination is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, more importantly,...
The Latest AI Superpower? Describe An Image And The Computer Will Create It
In each case, the text at the bottom of the image was the prompt fed into the program, and the picture above, the output....
How Pacific Northwest Ballet Is Progressing With Diversity
“The company is more racially diverse today than it was in 2020, when about 30% of the company was BIPOC. Racial identity should only...
Canada Tries To Make A Case For Internet Regulation Because Of… The Arts?
The emphasis: that material cultural and live performance follow the virtual. It’s an odd hierarchy to be asserting to an arts gathering emerging from...
Today’s Students — The Problem With “Excellent Sheep”
Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up...
Denmark Imposes Tax On Streamers To Support Local Programming
Lawmakers in Denmark have agreed global TV streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney, must pay a levy of 6% of their revenue...
Meet Glimmerglass’s New Director
Robert Ainsley succeeds Francesca Zambello, who led Glimmerglass, a summer festival of opera and theater, for more than a decade. In an interview, Ainsley...
New Technology Makes Lost Cities Of The Amazon Visible From The Air
Perched in a helicopter some 650 feet up, scientists used light-based remote sensing technology (lidar) to digitally deforest the canopy and identify the ancient...
Do The Words We Use Really Change The Way We Think?
John McWhorter: For example, the pathway from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled.” New words ultimately don’t leave freighted ideas behind; they...
Of Funding, Arts, And Innovation
Pre-COVID, Boston’s arts organizations had a pragmatic approach—they prioritized ticket sales over experimentation. As a result, Boston’s arts sector produces fewer new works than...
Melding Indigenous Music With Avant Garde Experimenting
The record is an unusual proposition: A rare fusion of pow wow—an Indigenous culture of music and dance—and experimental electronic production. Holding it all...
Casualty Of War: Russian Artists, Scientists, Creatives, Are Leaving
How low has Putin driven Russian culture? Here are two indications. Thousands of scientists and other intellectuals along with hundreds of ballet dancers and other...
Brilliant Scientific Breakthroughs Are The Product Of Their Context And Culture
The scientific revolutions of the last four centuries took place not just at the same time as political and religious conflict, invasion and enslavement,...
Basquiat Was A Subversive Artist. Now He’s Just A Brand
Sanitized and caricatured by corporate marketing schemes, Basquiat’s work has been defanged. Today, Basquiat the artist has become Basquiat the brand. - Jacobin
What Guston’s Cartoon Klan Tells Us
Guston didn’t know what to say about the Klan or about racial violence, except that he knew to fear it as a Jew, and...
The Conflicts Of Ego It Takes To Be A Writer
The act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and...
LA MoCA Imports New Chief Curator From Tate Modern
An L.A. native, Clara Kim has been senior curator of international art at Tate Modern since 2016, where she organized an acclaimed survey of...
Edmonton Symphony Music Director Departs For Germany
What everyone agrees on is that this very talented and still very young conductor will have the kind of opportunities in Germany that simply...
Study: Male Film Critics Dominate
The report, titled “Thumbs Down: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters,” shows that in early 2022, males continue to outnumber their female...
Would We All Be Better Off without Philanthropy?
Philanthropists rarely make the large, unrestricted gifts that the receiving institutions really want, and so the two parties bargain: over the purpose and the...
The New Energy Behind Street Dance
“Dancing is a form of escapism for some of us,” Diamond Hardiman, a 28-year-old dancer from Chicago, tells me. “So it’s about being real...
How Ukraine’s Most Prominent Novelist Is Recording The War
“I think everybody should do what he can do best for the country. The snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for...
Director Guillermo del Toro: The Current State Of Movie-Making Is Unsustainable
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance...
Report: Only 22 Percent Of UK Music Festival Headliners Are Women
Two major projects were launched in 2017 aimed at getting more female acts on stages - ReBalance and KeyChange - after a BBC study had found around 80% of...