Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Woman Interrupts Guthrie Performance With Half Hour Racist Rant
Patrons attending A Christmas Carol were seated and ready for the 7:30 p.m. showtime when a woman began screaming in the crowd. According to social media...
Tommasini To Step Down As NYT Classical Music Critic
At year’s end, Tony will step down as The Times’s chief classical music critic. It is a position he has held since 2000, giving...
How Shakespeare Drove Publishing And Publishing Drove Shakespeare In The 1700s
In the mid-1730s, Robert Walker waged a price war with the London publishing establishment, driving the cost of individual play editions down to just...
Hong Kong’s M+ makes A Play For Global Attention
A decade ago, the international art world derided Hong Kong as a “cultural desert.” The opening of the multibillion-dollar M+ museum epitomizes the city’s...
Now Venice Is Drowning In Billboards
The giant billboards now or until recently plastered across the churches for products ranging from OPPO smartphones to Recarlo jewellery – signal that these...
Weapon Of Mass Distraction: Why Facebook’s “Metaverse” Is An Illusion
In actuality, Facebook is basically spending $10 billion on a prayer that, in the short run, it might change the conversation. It gives them...
Christopher Walken Paints Over A Banksy On Camera
The spokesperson said in a statement: "We can confirm that the artwork at the end of 'The Outlaws' was an original Banksy, and that...
Cryptopunks: How A Market For NFT’s Was Born
If spending this kind of money on something as flimsy as a JPEG seems absurd, recall that collectors have bought empty space, a closed...
Is Science Fiction An “Inadequate Response” To Existential Threat?
As projections of nuclear fear themselves recede into memory, new fears (of global warming, environmental collapse) have come to replace them, locating such films...
Co-opting Woke
Charles Blow: "Perhaps no other word of the moment is so under attack as “woke,” a word born as a simple yet powerful way...
A New University To “Fix” Education? It Needs A Rethink About What’s Broken
UATX’s founders for years have used their various platforms to bemoan the state of higher education and propose how to fix it. They’re about to...
Why Are Some Classical Music Institutions Resisting Broadening Their View of Music?
Joshua Kosman: How long can an artistic culture survive and thrive on the work of the same circumscribed set of a dozen or so...
Quebec Court Upholds Fines On Theatres That Portray Smoking Onstage (Even With Prop Cigarettes)
The theatres challenged the fines, claiming it violated their freedom of expression. They argued Quebec’s ban on indoor smoking goes too far, because it...
NFT’s Explained
NFTs have fundamentally changed the market for digital assets. Historically there was no way to separate the “owner” of a digital artwork from someone...
Disney+ Loses Momentum
Disney+ growth slowed for the fiscal fourth quarter, adding 2.1 million subscribers to hit 118.1 million. That’s 10M less than it added in the...
How Beeple Is Changing The Relationship Between Artist And Collector
The dynamic nature of Beeple’s art speaks to an emerging paradigm in both art and crypto, where the artist and the buyer are in...
Local Journalism Is Disappearing. Might We Revitalize It With Existing Institutions?
One starting point is to re-imagine and use already-existing public infrastructures that produce and disseminate vital information, such as libraries, public broadcasting stations, and post...
Music Is What It Is – You Have To Meet It There
David Finckel: "People have a hard time sitting still. Attention spans are getting shorter. The only thing this doesn’t change is the length of...
Man And Daughter Killed Over Four Stradivarius Violins
“Our principal hypothesis is that the motive for the double crime was to find the international certification of authenticity of the violins so they...
Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History – A New Cultural Revolution
Xi’s use of history projects the message that the struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule have been buried by the need...
David Graeber Was A Startlingly Smart Anthropologist. He Died Just After Completing His Magnum...
"Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce...
How We Became Post-Modernist (And Why It’s A Problem)
Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to...
As Broadway Reopens, Who Is Broadway For?
Representation absolutely matters. But ever since Broadway announced that so many Black plays would reopen its season, there has been a feeling of dread...
London’s Barbican Center Commits To “Radical Transformation” After Investigation
The external review, which interviewed 35 people, identified “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in...
Cities Are Spreading Like Organisms
In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would...
