Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Kennicott: Remembering Wayne Thiebaud
There’s a Warhol, there’s a Lichtenstein, there’s a Thiebaud. His work was routinely grouped with that of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and thus...
Is The Met Museum Well-Served By Showcasing Disney?
The self-consciousness isn’t necessary; Disney transcended the high-low debate a long time ago. A better question is whether a major art institution dedicating programming...
How Disgust Drives Behavior
Once you are attuned to disgust, it is everywhere. On your morning commute, you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway...
Checking In With Claire Chase’s Multi-Decade Flute Project
Since 2013, she has been commissioning scores for a monumental project called “Density 2036”; when it comes to completion, in the designated year, it...
E.O. Wilson, 92, Often Referred To As Darwin’s Successor
Dr. Wilson was an eloquent and immensely influential environmentalist and was the first to determine that ants communicate mainly through the exchange of chemical...
YOLA Grand Ambitions For Music In LA
It is one of the most vivid examples of efforts by major arts organizations across the country to bring youth education programs out into...
The Landmine Field That Is Pop Christmas Music
With Christmas pop the companies are on tricky ground. As one company executive put it, the Christmas record needs “an indefinable atmosphere.” Sex is...
Arts Administrator Christopher Newton, 85
Among Newton's contributions were the development of distinctive Shaw Festival seasons, the establishment of a permanent acting ensemble and the creation of an artistic...
Identity Crisis? Universities Are “Triaging” Away Humanities
Suddenly, faculty in these departments are expected to justify why they exist and why anyone would need a degree in English. - The Baffler
NY State Tries Out A Universal Income For Artists
Creatives Rebuild New York is a new initiative that will provide monthly, no-strings-attached payments for up to 2,400 artists with financial need. A second component...
Amazon As A Grand Narrative
“The relation of Amazon to fiction, to story, is more than one of convenience, going to the core of its corporate identity,” Mark McGurl...
Yes, Movies Can Still Score: Spider-Man Breaks Box Office Record
Worldwide box office is $1.05B which makes Sony’s No. 2 film of all time, behind only Spider-Man: Far From Home ($1.13B). No Way Home is also the No. 1 title...
Does Art Really Have Role When Times Are Bad?
To Thomas Mann, the ironist was always serious in play. But does playing seriously mean playing unapologetically, letting oneself be nothing but a player?...
TokTok Is A Wildly Creative Place. But TikTokers Struggle To Grow Beyond It
What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large,...
The World Has A Plan To Try To Save Indigenous Languages. Not The US
The U.S. has an incredibly rich heritage of Indigenous languages ranging from Anishinaabe to Cherokee, Navajo to Tewa. But they are almost all endangered, in...
Some Of The Creative People We Lost This Year
Artists, musicians, technologists, actors, innovators and more. - The New York Times
In The 80s Booksellers Took Over A Belgian Town. Now The Tourists Have Left…
A band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home...
Michiko Kakutani On Joan Didion
Decades ago, she was already pointing to the startling disconnect between much of the American public and the political and media elites who “invent,...
Kaywin Feldman’s Plans For The National Gallery
“I feel like I was hired with one clear mandate from the board which, they like to say, is to put the ‘national’ back...
Watch: “Music Man” Understudy Kathy Voytko Steps In At Last Minute. Hugh Jackman Pays...
Jackman told the audience "Kathy, when she turned up at work at 12 o'clock could have played any of 8 roles. It happened to...
Painter Wayne Thiebaud, 101
Truth be told, Mr. Thiebaud was not really a Pop painter. Detractors sometimes tried to pigeonhole him as one or as an illustrator. In...
The Calculations Behind A Successful Christmas Movie
Welcome to element philosophy. Scriptwriters use them to tell their story, composers sprinkle scores full of sleighbells and producers use them to influence us to...
The Formula For A Good Christmas Song
Plenty of explicitly Christmas-themed songs will have certain musical characteristics, even though they’re always optional. These include a major key, an accessible pitch range and...
All The Books That Won Big Prizes This Year
From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2021. - Bookmarks
Why Our Ideological Fights Descend Into Fights About What Words Mean
The well-rehearsed rhetorical drama over this kind of conceptual terminology is only one of the ways in which arguments over definitions and usage have...
