Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Disney-As-Religion
More than ever before, people are identifying less and less with a religious tradition. This leads some people to look for meaning and identity in...
Claes Oldenburg, 93
Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the audience-participation “Happenings” then in vogue and expanding the...
We Miscalculated. The World Is Not A Game
As the scope of algorithm-based applications in social reality has expanded over the past decades, we have by the same measure been conditioned to...
The Meaning Of Art: To Point Out Evil
I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad...
How NFTs Are Upending The Art World
This so-called revolution strikes at something many hold sacred: the relationship between artist and art, the meaning in an act of creation. What’s happening...
The Complicated Remaking Of Oscar Hammerstein
Of all the great makers of the American song, none has undergone so drastic a change in educated—O.K., call it “élite”—opinion in the past...
Nicholas Payne: The State Of European Opera After COVID
"I think opera went through a sticky time, with all that Darmstadt stuff where people were deliberately writing music that people couldn’t understand, as...
Maryland Institute Of Art Lays Off Employees After They Unionize
The news comes roughly two months after employees working across various departments voted 86–17 on to join SEIU Local 500 on May 24. -...
Are NFTs The Killer App for Tickets? The NFL Experiments
This coming season, each ticket will be an NFT, which means that ticket holders will be able to buy, sell, and trade their tickets...
Adding Back The Color To Those Ancient Greek Statues
A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York scatters recreations of what these statues ACTUALLY looked like throughout its galleries:...
The Metropolitan Opera’s Inexorable Decline?
The Metropolitan Opera has been on a downward trajectory for fifty years. For the first thirty or so of those, the descent was gradual,...
Back To The Future: Canadian Internet Goes Down — Fans Urged To Print Tickets...
Rogers posted a notice on its website Friday saying the outage was impacting both its wireless and home service customers and is also affecting...
Libraries Are Digitizing And Something’s Being Lost
Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning...
Hong Kong’s Huge New Palace Museum Opens
While it might share a name with the historic Forbidden City institution, the $450 million Hong Kong museum is far from being a mere...
Why Do Writers Write?
There is often something compulsive about the act of writing, as if to cast out invasive thoughts. - The Paris Review
Are Museums Investing Their Money In Positive Ways?
hat about the ways the museums are using the money they already have: Are they using it to effect positive change in the world—or...
Who’s Running The Ship? San Francisco Makes More Major Changes In Its Leadership
For nearly a year now, SF Symphony has operated without a CEO and has been without a chief financial officer since January — not a time for making...
The Future Of Opera: Detroit?
It’s hard to overstate the unlikelihood of a director as innovative and internationally celebrated as Sharon taking the reins of a decidedly regional (and...
Richard Armstrong To Step Down As Guggenheim Director
He took the helm of the Guggenheim in 2008, following the resignation of firebrand director Tom Krens. Only the fifth leader in the institution’s...
And You Think You Have A Spam Problem (Twitter Removes A Million Accounts Each...
Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and...
Hollywood’s Answer To The World’s Problems: Only Superheroes. So Ordinary Humans Are Powerless?
There’s a preponderance of copaganda and superheroes saving the day and a category of narrative best described as wealth-aganda — stories focused on the interior lives...
Romanticism Was Once A Challenging Dynamic Force. What Happened To Defang It?
It’s an irony that arguably the most radical movement in European thought should have been appropriated by the conservative forces of the market, but...
Warning: Current Streaming Model Is Rotten, Must Change
The longer that this new “business model” is allowed to operate, the harder it will be to change. I often think about how 25...
How Is It A Century-Old Book On Prose Is Still Popular?
Nearly a century old, it’s still avidly read and discussed in MFA circles, thanks to its author’s meticulous dissection of the devices of fiction,...
Man Recreates Banksy Mural Inside A Vending Machine To “Start Discussion”
"Like everyone else I felt a real pride that he'd come to Lowestoft and the surrounding area and done that (painted his artwork) because...
