Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Ballerina That Captured Ismene Brown’s Heart
Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as...
What If We’re Thinking About The Culture Of Climate Change All Wrong?
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity. But what if...
New Oscars Diversity Data Collection Rules Have Producers Troubled
The goal is to spur more inclusive hiring in the film business, but some producers who are trying to comply say the process is...
Grand Central Station Gets A New Transport Hub — Way Below
In the end, Grand Central Madison succeeds brilliantly in its mission of handling the flow of crowds. But this is merely directing traffic, and...
AI Will Make Us Question Everything We Think Is True
The advancement of generative artificial intelligence is not an advancement toward artificial personhood for a simple, absolute reason: There is no falsifiable thesis of...
Librarians Are Showing The Stress
As I puttered around the conference, I thought about the fact that although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from...
Defending The American Musical
My sense of musical theater in America is that we may undervalue that the higher forms of the Broadway musical are every bit the...
100-Year-Old BBC Choir Directors Decry “Toxic” Culture At The BBC
Among the damning claims levelled by BBC Singers Acting Co-Directors Jonathan Manners and Rob Johnston is that a “recurring narrative of toxic culture now exists...
Disney’s Oldest Animator
Burny Mattinson became a messenger at Disney, beginning a career that would eventually make him the longest-tenured employee of the company (just shy of...
A New Genre Of Pandemic Poetry Is Helping Process What Happened
Many established poets published lockdown poems offering their own perspective on the power of poetry to make sense of the catastrophe. Slowly but surely whole collections...
Will The Ginormous George Lucas Museum Ever Be Done? Here’s Where It’s At
Even in the haze of construction, a seemingly endless swirl of workers, cranes and girders, the enormous scope of the project is coming into...
Museums Worldwide Are Reclassifying Ukrainian Art
In reference to the recent relabeling process, the Met told CNN in a statement that the institution, "continually researches and examines objects in its...
Is Lithuania The New Capital Of Performance Art?
“We have a history of performance art going back to the 1970s. These were often illegal actions in public spaces only seen by maybe...
Your Backstory Might Be Wrong. That’s A Problem
The evolutionary history of our species negates and overturns all previous cosmologies. Ever since Darwin, it seems most fiction writers have pretended not to...
Wheelchair Dance Company Hits The Road
“A lot of the time when I’m working, I come up against a lot of imposed judgements of ‘you’re a wheelchair-user so you can...
After The Success Of This HBO Series, Transmedia Will Never Be The Same
There are currently upwards of 60 game-based productions in development, from a new Super Mario Bros. movie to a God of War adaptation for Amazon, and analyst firms like...
AI Voices Are Starting To Take Over Reading Audiobooks
Tech companies including Apple and Google have been working on AI audiobook narration for a while now. In 2022, Google rolled out its services to publishers...
How “Free Markets” Got Confused With Freedom
The so-called “Tripod of Freedom” — which positions free enterprise, along with civil liberties and democracy, as “one of the three great elements” in...
Closer And Closer: An Endless Loop Of Misinformation
Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing...
How Is Streaming Affecting How We Interact With Music?
Worries about music today ignore every development in the transmission of music in the past. “I mean, when recorded music first came out, people...
Oscars: A culture Of Scandals Is Built In
Every year it's something. But then, that's built into the culture, and it helps the Academy thrive... - CBC
UK Prime Minister Says Parthenon Marbles Won’t Be Returned
“We share their treasures with the world, and the world comes to the UK to see them. The collection of the British Museum is protected by...
Oscars By The Numbers – Our Yardsticks Of Diversity
By default events like the Oscars have come to serve as a primary yardstick of representational gains. Hence our joyless new annual award-season tradition: the scrutiny...
The Ugly Truth About Gatekeepers
Nowadays the majority of the art world gatekeepers are ever more myopic, risk averse and conformist, daring only to support what is “hot”...
Pritzker-Winner David Chipperfield’s Unconventional Attitude On Buildings
As opposed to the “starchitect” impulse to create something iconic and instantly recognisable – to stamp their mark on a place – architecture, for...
