Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
What’s It Mean To Live In A Virtual Community? Look To The Real Cities...
Misinformation graffiti is going to haunt me. But, cities, over time, learned how to deal with those problems to make cities more livable—but the...
The End Of Giant Music Festivals?
2024 will also be known as the true beginning of the end of mega-live music festival culture with the unexciting two weekends of Coachella...
Was The 1960 Venice Biennale Rigged To Choose Rauschenberg?
“Taking Venice” doesn’t take a position on whether dishonest mischief sullied the jury’s process of choosing Rauschenberg, although it does leave the appropriate sense...
What King Charles’ First Portrait Is Meant To Convey About Him
It’s worth putting this into the context of “self-fashioning” in portraiture, succinctly described by the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt in 1980 as a process where identity...
Will Machines Replace Us? Naw — We Colonize A Different Space
This is simultaneously a misplaced conceit and misconceived fear: There are varied environmental niches to exploit and to dominate even in ecosystems with an...
The Line Between Fine Art And Craft Is Blurring
In many ways, it is obvious that furniture could be a direct expression of human thoughts and feelings. There is its closeness to the...
How Gian Carlo Menotti And Carlisle Floyd Defined Mid-20th Century Opera
As a composer, Menotti was consigned to the bittersweet status described by Somerset Maugham to characterize his own fiction—“in the first rank of the...
Corruption Roils China’s Top Music Conservatories
The public nature of Xue’s allegations has shaken the classical music world in China. And while these allegations are unproven, they highlight structural issues...
Cities Have Become Obsessed With Taller Buildings
Seven times more buildings of 150 metres or taller have sprung up since 2000 than were constructed in the entire 20th century. Five decades...
Transcendent Experiences: Dancing In The Louvre
"Over the years, I have felt many things in the world’s most-visited, and arguably most-famous, museum — irritation, exhaustion and some wonder, too. This...
Where Is The Village Voice For The 2020’s?
By rejecting the distinction between observer and observed, subject and author (at least to a degree, and more so in the arts and culture...
How The Language Of TV Is Shaping How We See Ourselves
You see a lot of this on TikTok now: videos that describe ordinary life using the language of television. Scroll through, and you’ll find...
Anna Deavere Smith On Learning To Listen To Americans
Stereotypes come about when we stop looking. Why we stop looking is something we all need to discern for ourselves. When we stop looking,...
Taylor Swift Remixed (DIY For Fans Who Wanted Something More From The Latest Album)
A small cottage industry of DJs, musicians and producers have been twiddling with TTPD since its release last month, and adding their own twists. -...
Filter Wars: How Our Digital Life Is Killing Creativity
"In any industry what matters is not what you’re making, but how many followers you have. Do you want to do something, do you...
Why Apple’s “Crush Creativity” Ad Is So Offensive
Contrary to the walkback last week by Apple marketing communications vice president Tor Myhren — “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re...
The Dancer As Athlete
A 2016 retrospective study that tracked injuries in a professional ballet dance company over a 10-year period found that most dancers experience a new injury every...
Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Seattle Invasion
“In the past, there seemed to be more movement from L.A. and the Bay Area to OSF, especially in terms of artists, so it’s...
King Charles’ Official Portrait: Really Really Red
His entire body is bathed in a sea of crimson, so his face appears to be floating.
India Blacklists Critics Abroad, Including Citizens
A brochure issued in July 2021 on the OCI website says that if the status is cancelled for any of the reasons stated, the...
How YouTube Became Most-Watched
YouTube is consistently the most watched streaming service in the U.S. on a TV in the U.S. every month, even beating Netflix and Amazon’s...
How Alice Munro Reinvigorated The Short Story
What Munro did was not so much write about women as write from inside them. When her characters don’t understand exactly what they’re feeling, she expresses it in...
The Art Of Constant Sharing (And Being In The Moment)
Claire Bishop argues that our smartphone-induced state of distraction can also be generative. The art work, she writes, “is less self-important, less total;...
How Alice Munro Was Deeply Tied To Her Southwestern Ontario Roots
So strong are the associations between Munro and her origins in southwestern Ontario that for some, the area around Huron County came to be...
How Game Theory Is Improving The Accuracy Of AI
The new work, which uses games to improve AI, stands in contrast to past approaches, which measured an AI program’s success via its mastery...