Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Walter Lippman’s 100-Year-Old Book “Public Opinion” Contained Warnings For Today
Our current debates about disinformation and the pernicious effects of social media could be rather more productive if the participants would bother to read...
Study: How To Change Minds And Opinions
The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found. Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not...
How Politics Is Driving Book Bans In America
“This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. The effort, she said, “is ideologically...
What Would Art Critic Hilton Kramer Have Thought About Today’s Culture?
His take on contemporary culture made him seem antique. “We are still living in the aftermath,” he wrote in 1982, “of the insidious assault...
Reason To Close: Broadway’s “Phantom” Has Been Losing $1 Million/Month
The show has earned $1.30 billion during its impressive Broadway run, according to the Broadway League, and has played an astonishing 13,733 performances with over 19...
Think Your Image Has Been Stolen By AI? Now There’s A Website To Tell...
Any matches in the results mean that the image could have potentially been used to train AI image generators and might still be used...
New AI-Generated Images Flood Stock Photo Websites
The development means there is increased competition for photographers on what were traditionally called photography stock websites, but might be now better described as...
Meet The Toronto Symphony’s New CEO
“I do not look like what the CEO of orchestra is supposed to look like. Whenever people are a bit surprised, it just underscores...
The Ancient Seneca’s Prescription For Navigating Tumult
You want to be happy and well, but your messy circumstances bite and gnaw at you relentlessly, distracting you from the habits of thought...
The Numbers Are In: Seattle Audiences Aren’t Returning To Performances In Great Numbers
Across the board, attendance has not surpassed three-quarters of pre-pandemic levels in the past six months. Between February and July 2022, visitor numbers remained...
Saudi Arabia Is Bulldozing The Ancient City Of Jeddah
Fly into Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second and most charming city, and vast empty patches scar the landscape. Most of its southern districts and much...
Good Luck With That: Poland Asks Russia To Return Looted WWII Art
Poland will formally ask Russia to return seven paintings now in a leading Moscow museum that were looted during World War II by the...
Legendary Public Radio Producer Jim Russell, Creator Of “Marketplace,” 76
Russell told Business Media News he envisioned it as a business news show that would appeal to a mass audience, not just executives and investors. The...
Lang Lang’s New Serious Album: A Case For Disney Songs
The pianist has spent the last four years commissioning new arrangements of the Disney songbook, turning the company’s vast library of show tunes —...
In A Hyper-Polarized World, How Do We Have Civil Public Debates?
I knew that if I merely retreated to my “side,” I would only contribute to the problem. With some trepidation, then, I set out...
Remembering Architect James Stewart Polshek
Polshek rarely worked for private clients. He devoted himself to public buildings, ranging from the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum...
The Importance Of Ritual In Success
Rituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the “correct” way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and...
New Architecture Projects Built Around Values
The best architecture can transform our ways of thinking, our work, our connections to local community. - The New York Times
Prominent Writer Advises Readers Not To Read His Biography Of Brett Favre
"I wrote a biography of the man that was largely glowing. Football heroics, overcoming obstacles, practical joker, etc. And, looking at it now, if...
An Inflection Point For Creating Images With Artificial Intelligence
Although momentum behind AI-generated art has been building for a while, the release of Stable Diffusion might be the moment the technology really takes...
Pop Music’s Tension Between New And Familiar
The longevity of old songs is an even greater mystery when what every era’s fans want is the fresh, the startling, the new. - The...
It’s Difficult To Overstate The Importance Of Martha Graham To American Dance
Modern dance in the United States did not emerge from a legible high-art context—a handful of individuals, mostly women, had to make their own,...
Why It’s So Difficult To Write About Images
The English vocabulary is especially limited, with only 170,000 or so words in an English dictionary. What does this mean to the art writer...
Australian Writers Decry Their Place In The Country’s Cultural Support Structures
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts...
How An Orchestra’s Home Imprints An Orchestra’s Sound
It seems logical that an orchestra’s basic tools of sound production – tone colour, dynamics, rhythmic precision and articulation – are strongly influenced by...
