Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Have The Oscars Really Become More Diverse?
While the Inclusion List shows that over the years the nominees have grown more diverse, the proportion of nominees who are part of an...
The Challenges Of Shaking Off Museums’ Colonial Legacies
The essential difficulty is that the vast majority of art museum professionals have limited training in how to identify and address contemporary manifestations of...
Demand For Indigenous Composers Is Rising
While technology is making composing more accessible to more artists, there's another important shift going on: scoring Indigenous stories with Indigenous music — rather...
So Many Of Our “Experiences” Are Abstract. What Happens When We Lose Our Connections...
One of the most consequential developments of our moment is that the experiences that create sensory memories are disappearing even faster than temperatures are...
An Attempt To Fix The Oscars Broadcast?
To reinvigorate the red carpet preshow, Oscars organizers hired members of the Met Gala creative team. Expect much more star power, specialized lighting (to...
A Writing Apocalypse?
Think of it as an ongoing planetary spam event, but unlike spam—for which we have more or less effective safeguards—there may prove to be no...
A Change Of Leadership At The Whitney
Weinberg’s departure is not entirely unexpected given his age, 68, and his long tenure at the museum. But his departure also signals an inevitable...
Whitney Workers Agree To New Contract With Big Raises
The new contract "will increase salaries by 30 percent, on average, with entry-level employees set to receive a greater raise, to $54,101 from $40,500....
The Reality Of Artistic Success In Canada: “I Still Can’t Pay My Bills”
Molly Johnson has achieved at the highest level in Canada, with the awards to match: “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me,...
Florida’s Attack On Free Speech Casts A Chill
The bill would make it defamatory to claim that someone is racist, sexist, or homophobic based on that person’s religious beliefs. This is, in...
Study: Why So Many Of Us Are Afraid Of Clowns
More than half the respondents (53.5%) said they were scared of clowns at least to some degree, with 5% saying they were “extremely afraid”...
Scientists Figure Out How To Turn Brain Signals Into Images
Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region...
What If You Optimized Your Everyday Life With Algorithms? This Guy Tried It
One of the first things I’d learned about optimization was that something is optimal if it is equal or preferable to any alternative. To...
Will Your Next Radio Host Be An AI? (It’s Already In Testing)
One of the advantages of RadioGPT is that it knows about an artist or a song or about a current event, so it can...
Art On Abortion Removed From Idaho College – It’s Against The Law?
Idaho Code 18-8705 states that public funds cannot be used “to perform or promote abortion, provide counseling in favor of abortion, make referral for abortion,...
The BBC Has A Huge Impact On UK Classical Music. Now It’s Shifting Priorities
The BBC, as the biggest commissioner of music and one of the biggest employers of musicians in the country, has a vital part to...
John Mauceri: “Tar” And The Culture Of Conducting
Fiction or not, the sort of backstage backstabbing depicted in “Tár” is, alas, very real. We conductors do not generally like our colleagues, and...
Wall Street Billionaire Commits Suicide, Leaving Hole In The Art World
“He brought the attitude of a businessman and an entrepreneur to a sector that, as you well know, is much less focused on that...
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...
