Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
With Art Sales Down, Auction Houses Pivot Towards Luxury Sales
Sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were down for the second year in a row in 2024. With both supply and demand for big-ticket art...
Daniel Harding, Conductor (Oh And Air France Pilot Too)
Over the past few years, the British-born Harding has led dual, and often dueling, careers: conducting Mozart and Mahler symphonies one day, piloting commercial...
British Fiction Generated Record Sales In 2024
BookTok, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and the indomitable Richard Osman led Fiction, with the category accounting for the year’s top five titles, 16 of...
New Discoveries At Luxor Could “Reconstruct” History
Artifacts found at the tombs included bronze coins with the image of Alexander the Great dating to the Time of Ptolemy I (367-283), children’s...
Could (Should?) Cities Be Built Of Wood?
I’ve been waiting years for the emergence of a bold timber architecture with designs that take advantage of the material’s expressive personality, its strength...
Why Boulez Matters (On The 100th Anniversary Of His Birthday)
The very precise way he used his hand helped communicate to players across the arena of an orchestra exactly where they were in the...
Hollywood Presses Pause As Wildfires Engulf LA
Amid the ongoing wildfires in Southern California, a number of glitzy Hollywood events and red carpet premieres have also been cancelled. - CNN
How Boston’s Faneuil Hall Came To Embody The Complicated Idea Of America
Figures from every corner of politics have used the hall for events and rallies, amplifying the legend “that this is where the idea of...
The Role Of Public Philosophy In Difficult Times
The practice of public philosophy is thriving today in a surprising number of forms. Different approaches give rise to meta-level questions about the nature...
Tracking The Rising Costs Of Streaming Subscriptions
In the audio-visual world, they have a name for the phenomenon depicted above – where rival platforms repeatedly increase their prices, inspiring their competitors to...
NBCUniversal, Fox Corp., Warner Bros. Discovery, DirecTV and Comcast Team Up On New Ad Platform
Universal Ads, as the new venture is called, was announced Monday as a collaborative effort to combat the domination of Google, Meta and other...
What Two YouTubers’ Stories Tell Us About The New Economics Of Creativity
Colin Furze demonstrates that in certain corners of the creative economy an individual with minimal overhead can work on select attention-catching projects and earn...
Can Animals Make Art?
If we take art to be something that is beautiful and consciously created – and animals consciously create things that look like art –...
Ingesting Writing For Translation, Transformation
When considering writing as a function of the body, we face the work’s physical, irreplicable quality. Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages...
Why Even Thinking About Utopias Seems Remote
When national politics is becoming increasingly polarised, global conflicts are escalating to new temperatures, and the toll of the climate catastrophe grows deadlier, the...
The Role Of Beauty In Science
Over the past three years, we have studied thousands of scientists on three different continents, asking them about the role of beauty in their work. Our research left...
Can What You Eat Change Your Brain?
In a sense, yes. The most extraordinary property of the gut-brain axis is that it is plastic. In the same way that your brain...
Pushing Back Against The Pushback Against Social Justice and Art
In the current climate, I would argue there are few more urgent subjects for art than identity and contemporary politics, just as was the...
What MrBeast’s Game Show Says About The State Of Today’s Media
Beast Games exists to make you hate it and other people, and for you to keep watching regardless. In this, it’s an extraordinary success. -...
Remembering American Avant-gardist Richard Foreman
Foreman’s idea of theater, born in opposition to the mainstream, was an acquired taste that some of the most rigorously inventive sensibilities couldn’t get...
Sherlock Holmes: The Case Of The Broken Copyright System
If Sherlock Holmes really is the last of the classic fairy-tale heroes, he may also be the first to have been protected by modern...
Report: Getty Villa Museum Gardens in Palisades Are On Fire
An unidentified official on LAFD radio said that the Getty Villa Museum was “catching on fire” shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday. - Los Angeles...
How Digital AI Twins could Transform how We Make Art
The Digital Twin idea is the notion of looking at something -- an organization, an eco-system, a city -- and measuring and defining it in as many meaningful ways as possible and creating a digital representation in which elements can be changed or manipulated to see how the rest of the model reacts.
Human Use Of Alphabets May Be Much Older Than We Thought
“The longer the sequence of symbols, the more likely that writing is involved,” Schwartz said, distinguishing alphabetic writing from semasiography, which refers to “signs...
Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Reopens After Hiatus And Reorganization
Following an 18-month hiatus, Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre plans to reopen on January 30 with new leadership, a new business model, and a newly renovated lobby. The 36-year-old company,...
