Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Man Using AI Wins First Prize In State Fair Art Competition. Other Artists Cry...
Jason Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital...
What Do We Owe The Future? Not Much
The universe is stranger than we can imagine, Albert Einstein is said to have said. Indeed, we should not even be sure there is...
Music Publishers Reach Agreement Over New Rates For Streaming Music
Sources also say that both sides were eager to avoid another protracted, distracting and brutally expensive legal battle, to put it mildly: The fight over...
New Computer Analysis Gives Insight Into Shakespeare’s Language
The Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project at Lancaster University, deploying large-scale computer analyses, has been transforming what we know about Shakespeare’s language. - The Conversation
Disney Ponders An “Amazon Prime-Like” Membership Program
The program would be somewhat akin to Amazon Prime, which offers advantages such as free shipping, discounts at Whole Foods and a complementary streaming video...
NYC Is Asking Artists For Proposals To Decorate Garbage Trucks (But Not Paying Them?)
Its inaugural edition happened in 2019, when four artists and students in a visual arts class were selected to cover the 400-square-foot blank “canvases”...
A Compelling Takedown Of The Creation Museum
We already have abundant material rebutting creationism on scientific grounds, but the Trollingers explicitly refrain from discussing the science. What they do instead is much more...
How A Book Goes From Idea To Bookstore
How does a debut novel go from a “very messy” draft on a writer’s desk to a published book, on display in bookstores around...
Was Rachmaninoff Really A Radical?
One aspect of Rachmaninoff’s legacy that deserves greater scrutiny is his peculiar resonance with early-twentieth-century American pop music. George Gershwin, the son of Russian...
A Wave Of New Indigenous Dance On Canada’s West Coast
Indigenous dance is always a way to share knowledge and teachings across generations, a way to know and express who you are, and who...
A Lifetime Collecting Books. And Now They Leave Home
My mind wanders back to a final stroll I took through my parents’ library just before the home was sold—acres of empty shelves, a...
Everything Is Boring Now – Our Music, Our Books, Our Theatre. Why?
I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate. Public arguments people do have about art — about appropriation and...
NPR Hires An “Audience Editor”
Pablo Valdivia "will collaborate across Newsroom and Programming to identify, develop and distribute content that will appeal to Latinx audiences,” says Emily Barocas, Deputy...
How American And European Musical Tastes Are Diverging
There seem to be several currents in European composition: the heirs of Pierre Boulez, post-serial, and neotonal. Among the younger composers, however, there is...
Next Goal For Artificial Intelligence: Reasoning
The ultimate goal, in Dr. Ferrucci’s view, is that A.I. becomes a trusted “thought partner,” a skilled collaborator at work and at home, making...
A Good Metaphor For Approaching Complexity
The three-body problem is the best metaphor I’ve found for a social complexity that affects us all today—a problem resulting from the interaction of...
Inside Hamburg’s Steinway Factory
A piano has more than 8,000 individual parts. The building process begins with curing the wood, leaving large sheets of maple, beech and mahogany...
Security For Art In Canada Is Lax, Say Experts
However it happened, it's clear those who stole a world-famous portrait of Sir Winston Churchill from the Château Laurier planned the heist meticulously. It...
New Deal: Washington Post As Idea Factory For Hollywood
Two months since the announcement of a “strategic partnership”—in which Imagine will “create scripted and non-scripted film and television properties derived from The Post’s vast archives, current...
Are We Crippled By Mythologies Of “Progress”?
We see others as crippled by ignorance and cowed by superstition; we don't see the extent to which we are, in our own ways,...
Don’t Diss Pessimism. It’s Useful
Given that the world we live in forces us to deal with pandemics, economic problems, wars and climate change it can seem overwhelming that...
My Friend Was A Brilliant Dancer. And Then He Killed Himself
After our time training together in the '70s, Richard went on to join two of the finest ballet companies in the world at the...
San Francisco Art Market Struggles
The Gagosian Gallery closed last year, and Pace will close its Palo Alto gallery next month. Working artists have had to leave their Bay...
The Politics Of Book Banning (Basically, We’re All Against It)
Americans on both sides of the political aisle were opposed to banning books, although it also found stark differences when it came to how...
The Cultural Politics Of Counting People
In theory, counting the population seems so basic, so neutral: a math problem, albeit “a serious slog” of one. But the numerical is political,...
