Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Real Threat To Academic Freedom Isn’t Cancel Culture, It’s This…
With the privatization and commercialization of higher education, universities are run like businesses, in which a degree becomes a product, students become customers, and...
School Protests From A Century Ago Set The Tone For Today’s Controversies
Telling parents you don’t want their kids to have the best possible public schools is never good politics. A full century ago, the most...
African Diaspora Music Project Collects 1,200 Symphonies By Black Composers
Louise Toppin is on a mission to recalibrate who, what, and how we program our concert seasons to enable a more equitable representation of music...
True Crime: Manhattan’s Art Theft Police
The unit has impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Center. They arrested...
Study: Disparities In The Ways Theatres Are Funded
“Almost no theatre of color has a budget over $3 million. Until we reach $5 million, we don’t get access to commission funding or...
Why Did An Australian TV Network Pay $1 Million For An Interview With Adele?
The answer is we got there via a thousand cuts, incremental concessions that have contributed to, and reinforced, the idea that mainstream media is...
400,000 Books Burned In Bookstore Fire
A book signed by Queen Victoria and a first edition of the Radio Times from 1923 were lost when the fire broke out at...
Cool – A Brain Scan! But What Does It Mean?
Beyond grasping the stakes of these statistical debates, then, public engagement with neuroscience would be less prone to overreaches of ‘neurorealism’ if equipped with...
The Musicians, Dancers Killed In The Wisconsin Holiday Parade
Three of those killed were members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, a group of women whose pompom routines have been a staple of local...
NYT’s 100 Notable Books For 2021
They made a list. Checked it twice... - The New York Times
Why Artists Should Have Resale Rights
Auction houses or other market intermediaries wishing to incorporate such activities into their equity practice could pledge a portion of the seller’s commission or...
How An Ancient Roman Mosaic Spent Fifty Years As A Coffee Table In A...
A priceless Roman mosaic that once decorated a ship used by the emperor Caligula was used for almost 50 years as a coffee table...
Grandmaster Sues Netflix Over “Queen’s Gambit” Portrayal
The complaint accuses Netflix of disparaging Nona Gaprindashvili's achievements to make for a more dramatic story and dismissing her earlier allegation of defamation without...
Remembering Dave Hickey, The Renegade Critic
Like so many Texan artists before and after him, he had a tortured relationship with his home state and its mythology. He kept trying...
Brit Awards Scrap Male/Female Categories
Artists like Sam Smith and Will Young had previously called for the change, saying the current system excludes non-binary artists. - BBC
NYC To Give Brooklyn Museum $50 Million
“I’ve been dreaming of this since I joined the museum a little over five years ago,” Pasternak said. “Our exhibitions and public programs have...
New Facility Signals San Francisco Conservatory Community Attitude
Bowes Center signals a major expansion of the Conservatory of Music, which has most of its academic and performance spaces a few blocks away...
Eddie Redmayne: Playing “Danish Girl” Trans Character Was A Mistake
“No, I wouldn’t take it on now. I made that film with the best intentions, but I think it was a mistake,” Redmayne told...
Writer Robert Bly, 94
He "galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men’s movement with a best seller that called for a restoration of primal...
Opera As Mountains To Be Summited
Matthew Aucoin finds impossibility to be a constant in the history of opera. “The art form’s first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Italy strove to re-create...
We’ve Made Progress. But The Thing About Progress Is It Has To Progress…
Those without the vision to produce art as means toward an end, rather than the end itself, have placated the wealthy donors who are...
What If We Stripped Humanities Education Back To First Principles?
The Catherine Project’s commitment, borne out beautifully by our seminars thus far, is that great books are supremely egalitarian: They move and challenge us...
Theatre Norms: Always Changing
The 19th century brought about the popularization of the proscenium arch: an architectural feature that effectively separates the audience from the actors on stage. Alongside...
Two Books Explore What It’s Really Like To Be A Ballerina
There are dancers, and there are ballerinas. Just like there are cooks, and then there are chefs. - Alastair Macaulay
The Cultures Of Science And Art Aren’t So Different After All
Did cultural movements in art fertilize scientific breakthroughs? It’s an intriguing correlation, perhaps not much more. But it underscores the point that one culture,...