Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Did Yoko Ono’s Celebrity Doom Her Art?
Like any artist, Ono wanted recognition, but she was never driven by a desire for wealth and fame. Whether she sought them or not,...
Is Spotify Just Not That Good A Business?
Questions about its profitability outlook often have been seen as keeping a lid on its stock. - The Hollywood Reporter
It’s The Purity Of Ideology That Gets In The Way
The quest for purity informs cancel culture. It pushes partisans to ever-greater extremes, even when those positions are politically self-defeating. It turns historical heroes...
Why Is The Entertainment Industry Obsessed With Pre-existing Content?
Today’s entertainment marketplace is defined by its faith in the limitless potential of preëxisting intellectual property. There are sprawling franchises. There are reboots, dark...
What Radio Hosts Bring To Classical Music
Throughout the country, radio hosts play a key role in bringing classical music into the everyday lives of listeners and connecting them to the...
This String Quartet’s Board Fired Them. Now The Board Has Been Replaced And Musicians...
The resolution was reached with help from two attorneys who read about the plight of the fired quartet members – cellist Myles Jordan, violinists...
Keeping Jazz Alive In Detroit
You cannot tell the history of jazz in America without also telling the history of jazz from Detroit. From the mid-20th century until the...
Why Do Dictators Have Such Bad Taste?
Their palaces and possessions are their trophies and their way of bragging to the world that they have succeeded. And they become the physical...
Welcome To The Cheech: Major Chicano Museum Opens
Cheech Marin has amassed a collection of more than 700 paintings, drawings, sculptures and mixed-media works by Chicano artists. In art-world circles, Marin’s...
A Fluxus Pioneer Explains It All
On June 21, Nye Ffarrabas turns 90. She is "in the midst of several new Fluxus projects". When asked whether she had any advice...
How BAM Expanded Its Audience During The Pandemic
“BAM isn’t just for one audience. We were consistently sold out this season and more often than not had a standby line. That’s because...
Renee Fleming – Keepin’ On Keepin’ On
A good run indeed. At 63, an age when many if not most opera singers have retired, Fleming is still keeping extremely busy —...
In Which I Attempt To Convince You Of The Value Of Reality TV
For many Americans, watching so-called lowbrow, “mindless” reality TV — the type of content that doesn’t further our intellect in any tangible way —...
New AI Breakthrough Makes Startling Pictures, Raises Questions About Creativity
It's leaps and bounds ahead. It raises immediate questions about how these technologies will change how art is made and consumed. It also raises...
How Much Responsibility Do You Have To Be An Informed Citizen?
There are two reasons why it is unclear whether positing a personal responsibility to be informed improves our information practices. - Psyche
Jaron Lanier: A Non-Obvious Way To Fix Social Media? Groups!
The point is that the people in the groups know one another well enough to take on the pursuit of trust and quality, and...
Donor Run Amok: A Museum Sells Its Soul
Welcome to Long Beach. Here at Cal State University, Kleefelds in the Kleefeld at the Kleefeld are the new norm. Disturbingly so. It’s a...
Nijinska: The Choreographer Stuck In Her Brother’s Shadow
As a private entrepreneur without official sponsorship, Diaghilev made his way with an astute combination of connoisseurship and the ability to cultivate an inner...
Radical Reimagining? Safer Neighborhoods Begin With The Arts
It is not just a pretty idea. The UPenn Social Impact of the Arts Project studied New York City in 2017. Their data showed that neighborhoods...
Report Finds “Absurd” Levels Of Government Interference In Museums
The report tracked “astonishing, nearly absurd” cases of political interference at some museums, the commissioners say, and outlines how some museums are poorly run....
Survey: What Artists American Museums Show
Nearly half of all art exhibitions showcased by U.S. museums between 2017 and 2021 were dedicated to less than five percent of a quarter...
What Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Arts Presenters Learned During COVID
Another thing that’s changed “is it turns out we like our neighbors. And there are plenty of communities that are under-represented in our spaces,...
The Value Of “Anchor” Artists
We discovered that at the center of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area is the anchor artist: someone central to their community...
Can Algorithms Be Protected Speech?
Recommendation systems pose difficult questions about what it means to speak, and whether speaking is something that only a person does. How do we...
The Internet As Endless Doom Scroll
It might seem the other way around: that our fleeting attention is the result of an internet that’s unrelentingly feeding us the now. But my...
