Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
This Nigerian Nobel Laureate’s Got A New Book, 50 Years After The Previous One
Wole Soyinka has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has written more than two dozen plays, a vast amount of poetry, several memoirs,...
Trial In Spain Of Former Director Of Valencià d’Art Modern Accused Of Buying Forgeries
Consuelo Císcar is accused of using €3.4m in public funds to buy 98 works of art by the late artist Gerardo Rueda that she...
Two High Profile Projects Aimed At Reviving Memphis
Two ambitious new projects by leading architecture firms are at the forefront of the renaissance, using design to lift Memphis’s image in the eyes...
What Happens When You Try To Hack Opera With Gamers, Techies And Artists?
“Western opera was invented because people from different disciplines came together to reimagine theatre. They leveraged the best of all the art forms and...
A Social History Of Laughter
In the early years of the 18th century a select group of philosophers began to conceive of laughter as something that might police the...
Globalization Has Been Widely Misunderstood. It’s Important To Be Clear About It
We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation...
How A Small Labor Dispute At Strathmore Hall Led To Baltimore Symphony Withdrawal
The escalation of events — from a contract with about a dozen employees to an ugly public battle between two of Maryland’s flagship arts...
Broadway Attendance Down. But What Does It Mean?
The anecdotal evidence, gleaned from social media and private conversations with industry leaders, suggests a variety of challenges — lingering fears of the coronavirus, the...
Broadway Box Office Slips Again. Did It Open Too Soon?
Big picture: the 27 shows currently running grossed $19.66 million together last week, with 168,169 butts in seats. That’s a 11% box office drop...
Royal British Columbia Museum To Close Indigenous Galleries, “Decolonize”
The Becoming B.C. gallery, which focuses on the story of European settlement in B.C. and has been widely criticized for pushing a colonial narrative, will...
Why “Mistakes” In Language Are Actually Progress
Someone in my line of work hears around him a linguistic feast, where many just hear the English language going to the dogs. -...
The Impossibility Of Translating
To put it less politely, translation is a bitch. - Granta
Edinburgh Fringe Once Again Feeds The West End
There remained no shortage of quality work presented at the fringe, but its own aesthetic had changed over this time, contributing to making it...
Why Museums Should Cut Down On The Art In Storage
Museums should downsize storage for commercial, environmental, social and ethical reasons. Post-pandemic with their revenues ravaged, they need to take a hard look at...
How Shondaland Became An Empire
In Shonda Rhimes’ renewed pact, the bullet points specify that Shondaland will now be, as Rhimes puts it, a “one-stop shopping” source for Netflix...
A Reason To Invest In The Arts In The South?
A recent study found that a person living in the South received only $4.21 in arts and culture funding from philanthropy, compared to the national average...
A First: Big Museum Opens Its Entire Collection To Visitors
Normally, only some six to ten percent of collections at major museums around the world, the rest kept in closed storage depots. That will...
Now AI Is Formulating Hypotheses Scientists Haven’t Thought Of
Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural...
Why Are AI Data Sets Disappearing From The Internet?
All together, about a dozen AI datasets vanished—hastily scrubbed by their creators after researchers, activists, and journalists exposed an array of problems with the...
How Korea Became A Major Cultural Exporter
Once streaming services like Netflix tore down geographical barriers, the creators say, the country transformed from a consumer of Western culture into an entertainment juggernaut...
This Year’s Booker Prize Winner:
Booker judges pronounced Damon Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries,...
DC City Council Approves Two New Arts Commission Members Over Objections Of Its Chairman
The controversy comes as the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities has dramatically reshaped its policies to focus on diversity and equity and to broaden...
Jazz Guitarist Pat Martino, 77 — Overcame Amnesia To Perform Again
In 1980, brain surgery left him with no memory, but he painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three...
The Cultural Revisionism Industry
Over the past few years, a certain genre of media has found opportunity in debunking false conceptions of the semi-recent past and meditating on...
Rehabilitating Chuck Close
Where Close’s work ultimately lands in the canon of American art will serve as the art world’s first test case for how an artist...