Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
European Movie Box Office Down 70 Percent In 2020
European movie theaters suffered a 70.4% year-on-year drop to €2.6 billion ($3 billion) in box office revenue in 2020. In terms of admissions, there...
Art Pranks (With A Message) On The Rise?
Most of these prankster examples either take a jab at the art market. This intersection seems to have escalated in the last five years,...
First Time: UK Audiences For Streaming Beat Traditional TV
Out of almost a thousand 18-70 year olds who watch at least 5 hours of television per week, more are watching via streaming platforms than traditional...
Today’s “Natural” Acoustics Are Based On Theatre Experiments in 18th Century Paris
When Hollywood technicians debated how to make movies sound natural, they were unwittingly following a trail blazed by 18th-century architects, who spent decades working...
San Jose Theatre Posts All-White Cast, Apologizes, Then Cancels
In attempting to defend itself, San Jose Playhousemade more perceived mistakes, including posting, then deleting, a note that was meant to be private; as...
Gotta Love How This Year’s Documenta Artists Were Announced
In Germany on Friday, October 1, you might have picked up a copy of Asphalt—a publication that is sold to benefit poor and people struggling...
What’s Up With The Movie Museum’s Giant Orb? (Death Star?)
A big glass-and-steel ball is not vanishing into the mist. It sits there and it’s shiny and hard and you have to pay to...
Biden Makes Historic Picks For New Heads Of NEA And NEH
Both selections are historic: Lowe will be the first Native American nominated to lead the federal humanities agency and Jackson will be the first...
After COVID: NYC Artists Testify About The State Of Things
“The illusion of reopening is that we’re back where we were in February of 2020. The reality is that in the meantime, there’s been...
The Critical Question (Post-COVID)
Playwright Oscar Wilde once warned an age without criticism is “an age that possesses no art at all.” He never could have imagined an...
Come For The Star Wars, Stay For The Kara Walker…
At the Lucas Museum: “What would be fantastic is if people came looking for Star Wars and learn about Ralph McQuarrie and then they learn about...
25-Year-Old New Play Incubator Closes
According to a press release, the decision to shutter the 27-year-old play development mainstay was a “unanimous yet painful conclusion” of the organization’s board...
Philadelphia Orchestra Ditches The Formal Dress
“We’re well into the 21st century. It’s time to acknowledge that in many ways, and one of them is the way the orchestra looks...
The Future Of Tourism? Venice Uses High Tech Surveillance To Limit The Mobs
The city’s leaders are acquiring the cellphone data of unwitting tourists and using hundreds of surveillance cameras to monitor visitors and prevent crowding. Next...
Inside The World Of Screen Subtitlers
It’s possible for subtitles and dubs to be so seamless that they feel invisible without pushing audiovisual translators ourselves out of sight. - Zocalo Public...
Hunter Biden, Artist, Opens His Show. Are His Paintings Really Worth $500K?
As has been previously reported, his gallerist, George Bergès, is looking to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 a piece for Biden’s paintings. And this has...
Why Don’t Museums Use Their Leverage?
In the museum world, there’s enormous potential stored in the museum’s permanent art collection – not as a financial asset, but as a lever...
Fatty Arbuckle And Hollywood’s First Celebrity Scandal
The Arbuckle affair was the most notorious in a string of Hollywood scandals that threatened to kill off the movie industry in its adolescence. -...
The Decline (And Fall?) Of Facebook
What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize....
Art Market Soars To Record £2.7 Billion, Driven By Online, NFT Sales
Having seen sales collapse by a third in the previous year because of the initial crisis caused by the pandemic, sales soared between June...
The Strange Saga Of Ozy Media Continues: We’re Not Shutting Down
“Last week was dramatic, it was difficult. At the end of the week we did suspend operations with a plan to wind down,” Carlos...
Is Email The Worst Form Of Communication Ever?
Let’s start with what should be obvious: email is a bad way to communicate. There’s the way it gives license to verbiage, turning simple...
The Novel In A Time Of On-Demand Everything
If what fiction most essentially is for us is a volume of commodified time, one of the most notorious facts of contemporary literary life...
Orchestra Conductors: Old Guys Rule
Orchestra conductors appear to live longer than people in any other profession. Famous conductors of the past, then in an era when life expectancy...
The Privilege Of Making Mediocre Art
It’s a common topic of conversation among creatives of color: Can we afford to make mediocre art? Black, brown, Indigenous, East Asian and South...