Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Conductor David Robertson Returns To Composing
My composition chops were extremely rusty and needed buckets of WD-40 put on them. What was interesting is how once you get started, you...
Why Do We Value Consistency? Consistently Wrong Isn’t A Good Outcome
Consistency isn’t of value, in and of itself. If the outcomes are bad, the fact that they were arrived at by employing a consistent...
Disasters Are On The Rise. We’re Going To Have To Think About Them Differently
Disasters compress time, and in a world besieged by them, dramatic shifts occur: For planners and architects and officials, whose work typically unfolds over...
Misty Copeland Shares What It Took To Become A Star Dancer
"It wasn't until ballet came into my life that I started to feel that I could be a person, a person in the world,...
Elon Musk’s Twitter Show: Does He Know What He Bought?
I’ve watched Elon Musk treat Twitter as a comedy club on the one hand, and the universal town square on the other. What he...
Seattle’s Once-Thriving Music Scene Is Broken. How To Fix It?
Seattle was a thriving, energizing, musical city. It was synonymous with Sub Pop and KEXP. It was home to literally hundreds of rock, pop, hip-hop, soul,...
Brian Eno Explains Art To You
What happens when you go look at a painting you’ve never seen before? What I think happens is that you’re seeing it in the...
Louisville Orchestra Names Graham Parker Chief Executive
Parker brings more than 25 years of experience in leadership roles at a range of arts organizations. Most recently, he was the president of Decca...
Jeff Bezos Says He’ll Give Away Most Of His Money. So How?
“The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way,” he said. “It’s not easy. Building Amazon was not easy. It...
Science Defines The Modern Age, Right? So How Did We Get It So Wrong?
How is it that the dawning of the age of reason, which saw science and technology become preeminent in western culture, coincided with the industrial...
Maurice Sendak’s Dance Between Art And Music
Music was an essential ingredient in Sendak’s creative process. “The work can’t happen without music,” he said in 1994. “I think everything I’ve done...
Fresno Voters Approved A Measure To Spend Millions On The Arts. Now The City...
Measure P went before Fresno voters in November 2018 to add a 3/8th-cent increase to the sales tax for 30 years to benefit parks...
Historically We Have Been Defined By Our Geographies. That May Be Changing
Geopoliticians’ reluctance to reckon with the climate crisis comes from their sense that there are only two options: transcend the landscape or live with...
480,000 University Of California Academic Workers Walk Off The Job Over Pay
About 48,000 unionized academic workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses — who perform the majority of teaching and research at the state’s...
Why Do So Many New Movies Look Like Crap On The Big Screen?
As a practical matter, turning out movies that look worse in a theater than they might on a TV screen is a real problem...
The Science Of Violins’ “Phantom Notes”
The team found that all violins produced combination tones, but the oldest instruments produced the strongest ones. The magnitude of the most prominent combination...
Study: Rats Move In Time To Music
Researchers in Japan played Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448) for 10 rats, and tiny wireless accelerometers affixed to the...
A New Era In Arts Activism
This shift in activism reflects a new generation of players whose futures, and those of their sports, are dependent upon climate mitigation. - ArtsHub
How Three Seattle Arts Groups Are Coping Post-PPP Money
A lack of PPP funding has left a large hole in their revenue, but 2022 ticket sales or enrollment numbers generally still aren’t what...
Inflation, Changing Audience Behavior Are Muting A Broadway Rebound
Amid the spate of new shows, producers are facing higher costs due to inflation and extra understudies, as well as the added stressors of...
Man Repatriates Artifacts After Reading Newspaper Story
John Gomperts, who lives in Washington, realised that the ancient pieces worth up to £80,000 – including two seventh- and eighth-century BC Cypriot vases...
SFMoMA’s New Director Lays Out A New Direction For The Museum
Now after nearly six months in charge, Bedford is beginning to lay out his vision for SFMOMA and announcing his first initiatives as director....
Wow This Is Hard: How To Get Comfortable With Ambiguity
In this classical view of the world, all fundamental entities are either one or the other. To my undergraduate brain, this simply made sense....
An English National Ballet Dancer On The Clarifying Impacts Of The COVID Shutdowns
Prescious Adams credits the time spent training in lockdown with giving her technique more clarity – “I think of my body as this geometrical...
New York’s New Wage Transparency Law Exposes Art’s Low Wages
In some cases, the new law has served to expose just how meager some salaries in the cultural sectors remain. As museum workforces across...
