Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why The Art World Has Been Taking Another Look At Rococo
So what is Neo-Rococo, really? It’s a contemporary movement that merges the delicate pastels, ornamental elegance, and sensuality of 18th-century Rococo with modernist abstraction...
Peter Schjeldahl’s Death Marked The End Of An Era
Schjeldahl’s death was not just the death of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art. It was an approach that...
Nicole Ritchie And Paris Hilton’s Excellent Opera?
It’s an enlightening moment, one of many it turns out, in “Paris & Nicole,” a three-episode lark about Hilton and Richie reuniting to write...
Canberra Youth Theatre Takes A Drastic Step To Survive
The decision to pause all productions in 2025 will have a significant impact on performance opportunities for young people. It also means a major...
How Daniel Dennett Changed How Philosophers Think
Dennett was important because his work signalled a sea change in the concerns and methods employed by philosophers of mind. In the years BD...
Sotheby’s Cuts 100 NY Staff After Lower Financial Earnings
In an email statement, a Sotheby’s spokesperson said, “Given the challenges the market has faced this year, we’ve taken a careful look at our...
Ruby Slippers From “The Wizard Of Oz” Sell For $28 Million
Heritage Auctions, based in Dallas, slapped a $3 million estimate on the slippers. Pre-sale bidding had taken the price up to $1.55 million before fierce...
There Is No “True Meaning” Of A Song
When an artist is inevitably asked “what’s the meaning behind this song?” and they give a literal answer, it immediately closes down the different...
Report: UK Visual Artists Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage
The median annual income for self-employed visual artists currently stands at just £12,500, 40% less in real terms than they were earning in 2010....
Pew Study: Half Of All Teens Are Constantly Online
Nearly half of teens in the U.S. are online almost constantly, and the platform they’re using the most is YouTube, a new study from the Pew...
The Woman Who Helped Track Down Art The Nazis Stole
By the end of the war, 26,984 freight cars of artworks from French collections had left Paris, their contents destined for temporary storage in...
Children Of Famous Architects Ask “Why?”
Stardust is the latest in a niche genre of films about architects made by their children. The punishing profession is clearly something that inspires both...
Viewers Streamed 1Billion Hours Of YouTube On Their TVs This Year
This year, the biggest categories for YouTube were sports and children’s entertainment. Watch time for sports content grew 30% year-over-year, according to the company,...
Italy’s Public Broadcaster Has Been Turned Into Propaganda Machine
The broadcaster has undergone a series of radical transformations, often referred to using the shorthand TeleMeloni. A monologue in which the writer Antonio Scurati was set...
Data: Venice’s Tourist Visitor Tax Didn’t Reduce Crowds
Data found that during the 29 dates the initial €5 access fee was in force in 2024, Venice received on average 7,000 more visitors...
Paris Opera Dancers On Strike
The strike, following unsuccessful negotiations, concerns the remuneration of preparation time before performances. According to the union, only six hours of monthly preparation are...
Warner Restructures Its Networks Into Streaming And Not
The company's new global linear networks division will house its networks of news, sports, scripted and unscripted programming like CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV and...
Seattle Art Museum Guards Agree To New Contract
“While we did not secure all the improvements we had hoped for, the union was able to secure a number of wage and benefit...
Harper Collins’ CEO Has Some Ideas About AI In Publishing…
“A book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an A.I. facsimile of its author.” At last: No more having...
WWII Teenager’s Diary Records How Victims Used Culture To Fight Back
The diary that Yitskhok Rudashevski kept from June 1941 to April 1943, written entirely in Yiddish, contains references not only to folklore from the Vilna Ghetto,...
Author James Patterson Gives Christmas “Bonuses” To Bookstore Workers
“Booksellers save lives. Period,” Patterson said in a statement released Tuesday through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company. “I’m happy to be able to...
The Amazing Kreskin, 89
Just what was Kreskin’s talent? “I am not a psychic, an occultist or fortune teller. I am not a mind reader, medium or hypnotist....
An Ode To Harlem’s Apollo Theatre
The theater symbolizes the many eccentrics and geniuses that abound in this country. It’s an enabler of dreamers and risk-takers. It’s a place where...
The Fierce Aesthetics (And Historical Trolling) Of The London Contemporary Music Festival
Art is a con. That’s why it’s great. I’ve always said art should lower gross domestic product; it shouldn’t be there to bolster efficiency, or do...
Sometimes Insularity And Isolation Is Better For A Thriving Culture
The cultural ideas (what was originally meant by ‘memes’) that are most suited to global dominance crowd out cultural ideas that developed locally and...
