Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Progressives Are Fighting Book Bans (And Getting Them Overturned)
The progressive wins are a development that looked unlikely as the right wing, often through organizations with connections to wealthy Republican donors, has introduced bill...
LA’s New Academy Movie Museum Will Rethink How It Portrays Industry Founders
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures was not far past its 2021 opening when people began asking how, in a museum devoted to a diverse and...
Report: Hungarian Government Is Suppressing Artists
The report's authors say that Orbán and his party, FIDESZ, have achieved this through a combination of consolidated state power and pressure on artists...
Scientists Watch A Memory Being Formed In A Living Brain
From earlier work, they had expected the brain to encode the memory by slightly tweaking its neural architecture. Instead, the researchers were surprised to...
Lab In Virginia Working To Save Ukraine Treasures
Created last year in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Cultural Rescue Initiative — a world leader in this field — the lab is compiling...
The iPhone Uses AI To Enhance Images. Is It Too Smart To Take Good...
A careful examination of the 13 Pro noted visual glitches caused by the device’s intelligent photography, including the erasure of bridge cables in a...
The World Heritage Sites At Risk In Ukraine
Among the UNESCO World Heritage monuments in immediate danger of destruction is the irreplaceable 11th-century cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv. - The Conversation
Researchers Are Using AI To Understand Animal Language
Researchers are using AI to parse the “speech” of animals, enabling scientists to create systems that, for example, detect and monitor whale songs to...
The Oscars And Baseball: “Fixing” Them Is Making Them Worse
Last year’s broadcast saw a 58 percent drop in viewership from 2020, according to Nielsen. But it may be that viewers are tuning out because the...
Universal Music Buys An Ape NFT To Lead NFT Music Group
On Friday, Universal's 10:22PM label said it paid $360,817 to purchase Bored Ape #5537 - a female character now known as Manager Noët All,...
Rare Marvel Comic Sells For $2.4 Million
The book, Marvel Comics No. 1, published in 1939, is so valuable because it is known as the pay copy, in which the publisher recorded...
The Arts’ Digital Problem
Digitalization has affected both the demand and supply for cultural content. Increasingly sophisticated technology and adoption of digital devices to experience things remote because...
Met Animates Under-Seen Rococo With Disney
The Met's eighteenth-century “decorative arts” usually languish in the museum’s emptiest galleries. Yet when Disney animated them into characters like the candlestick Lumiére in Beauty...
Why Are Black Women Museum Leaders Quitting?
The swift departures of these women in leadership positions have generally been swept under the proverbial rug, where these women quietly navigate the complexities...
How The Dua Lipa Plagiarism Case Could Change Music
If either Artikal Sound System or Linzer and Brown win their case, songwriters may have even more to worry about. Will one measure of...
Remembering Dance Critic Clement Crisp, 95
Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity...
The Anti-Putin Songs That Have Gone Viral In Ukraine
A track titled “Bayraktar,” of indeterminate origin, has been receiving hundreds of thousands of plays online, and is in rotation on Ukrainian radio. Over...
15 Things That Suck About Museums
Walking around a museum can feel a little off-putting when you know that workers aren’t being paid a fair wage — and, in the case of...
Classical Music, Politics, And The Ethics Around War
The reactions to people being banned and insisting, Oh, we’re not politicians, we’re artists, and therefore what we’re doing is not political—I think that...
End Of An Era: Humana Theatre Festival Calls It Quits
Several of the more than 400 plays presented at the festival have gone on to win wider accolades — “The Gin Game” by D.L....
Does The Rock ‘N Roll Hall Need A Name Change?
When the artists being nominated and inducted are questioning their own “rock and roll” credentials, does the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame have...
Barbara Kruger On Life In The Digital World
"I don’t sue people. I will let all these corporations who are old-school robber barons do that. I think copyrights are euphemisms for corporate...
We’re Studying How Literature Is Preserved (It May Be Important)
“Thinking about how cultural heritage survives seems like a useful thing to do, because right now—among many other things—that’s one of the important things threatened...
Why Do So Many Operas Kill Off Women?
Of the top 20 most performed operas worldwide in the 2017–2018 season according to Operabase.com, 75 percent feature female characters who were dead by the...
Study: Listeners Wearing Headphones Are More “Persuadable” Than Those Listening Through Speakers
The driver of this greater bond with listeners is the idea that headphones make it sound like the voices are inside one's head, meaning...