Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How Saudi Arabia Is Using Culture To Distract From Government
To hide the precarity of its rule, the government wants to erase its people from political discourse. It has transformed the rich and varied...
New 20 Percent EU Tax Threatens French Art Market
The E.U.-wide rule, which was quietly approved last April but will not take effect until 2025, could impose a 20 percent sales tax on...
How Ukrainians Are Trying To Defend Their Culture
As the one-year anniversary of the deadly 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, we take a close look at the ongoing work of hundreds...
MacDowell Artist Retreat Chooses A New Director
Chiwoniso Kaitano is the former executive director of Girl Be Heard, a nongovernmental organization that uses theater and the performing arts to advocate for...
Netflix Is Lowering Subscription Prices Internationally. Why?
“Effective immediately Netflix is to drop monthly subscription pricing in more than 100 territories globally,” but not in North America and Western Europe where...
As Iconic Characters Enter The Public Domain, Cheap Productions Start Making Money
As Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has shown, even if the movie isn’t a critical success, it can still make a hefty profit. Indeed, not...
The Creative Benefits Of Sabbaticals
In recent years, the number of employers offering sabbaticals has grown exponentially. In addition, many more workers, especially employees in managerial and professional roles, are...
Theatres In Ukraine Closed. Theatre Moved Into Homes
Kharkiv theatres closed at the start of the war; by the summer, the city’s famous puppet theatre performed a show about wartime in Bucha....
A History Of Having To Alter The Problematic Roald Dahl
Dahl’s antisemitism was widely reported around the time of his death. His editors had entered discussions regarding the misogyny and racism in some of his...
How Poetry Redirects Us In Language
“Poetry cannot save us, and yet the poets could do a great deal to redirect our minds and senses back to the proper object...
Tyler Cowen: We’re Failing To Make Progress In The Arts
I think in some areas of the arts we’ve moved backwards. It seems to me what you might call the design of neighborhoods, in...
The Failed Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House Merger Hearings Tell You Everything About The...
"We invest every year in thousands of ideas and dreams, and only a few make it to the top. So I call it the...
How California’s Major New Arts Education Funding Initiative Will Change Things
Proposition 28 creates a guaranteed annual funding stream for music and arts education by setting aside 1% from the state’s general fund. In 2023,...
How Speculative Profit Made The World
Under the increasingly uncontrollable uncertainty of our financialized world, speculation becomes a more productive mechanism to imagine community and collective coping with disorienting volatility....
We Thought AI Would Be Scary Smart. Instead It’s A Facilitator Of Banality
The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the...
Needed: Commonsense Tools To Protect Creative Work
A report released by Digital Citizens Alliance in August 2020 found that pirated streaming subscription services are used by an estimated 30 million individuals in the...
Is Intelligence Really Our Best Feature? Or Is It Holding Us Back?
Rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our...
AI Is Getting Awfully Good At Designing Buildings. So What Happens To Architects?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly advancing to a point where it can generate the design of a building completely autonomously. With the potential to...
Archaeologists Discover 4,500-Year-Old Palace In Iraq
During a press conference at the Iraq embassy in London on Friday, Tablet Hill was described as the “cradle of civilization” and “one of the most...
Police Link Prominent Now-Deceased Horn Player To String Of Rapes
As a young hornist in the 1970s, he helped launch the first French-horn soloist competition in America, inspired by the performances of European players....
Before We Get All Artificial About It, Consider Intelligence…
Most experts acknowledge that we are a long way off from seeing what AI researchers have termed “artificial general intelligence”: the kind of intelligence...
In English: The Importance Of The Words From Elsewhere
Emily Dickinson thought that words start a new, discrete cycle of life the moment they are uttered. While American English can be perceived as a threat...
The Most Troubling Thing About ChatGPT Writing? The Endless Cliches!
ChatGPT, the popular bot released to the public by OpenAI late last year, is obsessed with clichés and uses them all the time. Perhaps...
Now Come Tools To Detect ChatGPT Writing. Do They Work?
We dug into several proposed methods and tools for recognising AI-generated text. None of them are foolproof, all of them are vulnerable to workarounds,...
What Might Dudamel’s Move To The NY Phil Mean For San Francisco Symphony?
Salonen’s ambitious plans for San Francisco, conversely, have gotten off to a rocky start because of COVID-19. There’s still plenty of time to get...
