Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Should UK Museums Start Charging Admission?
For all kinds of reasons and on all kinds of levels, charging entrance would create a more equal culture and a more equal society. -...
The Virtues Of Performing All Of Something
A composer cycle is no mean feat – for both musicians and audiences. But there is something remarkable about hearing works from the same...
A Tale Of Two Orchestra Initiatives
Philly’s program is swimming, while Pittsburgh’s, after making initial waves, is treading water. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Reinventing The Meaning Of Work In Europe
Data suggest that something is amiss: across Europe, the average proportion of 15-29-year-olds not in work nor education or training exceeds the EU’s 9% target....
New Jersey Is Building A Billion-Dollar Studio Production Complex
The state economic development authority today approved a partnership with a $1+ billion studio complex including 22 sound stages set to rise in the...
Silent Disco And What We’ve Learned About The Power Of Moving Together
So what does the “silent disco” phenomenon tell us about dance? Researchers have used it to study social dynamics, finding that it interferes with the...
The Eccentric Volunteers That Make The Oxford English Dictionary Work
Though the OED is published by Oxford University Press, it is, in many respects, the spiritual and intellectual opposite of an elite university. For one thing,...
Evelyn Glennie On Music As A Physical Phenomenon In Your Body
I’m not a medical person, but we do know that sound is about vibration. The body is like a resonating chamber; every part of...
Study: Arts Branding Results Down, Values Up
Arts and cultural organisations that are achieving the strongest audience growth right now are not necessarily those pouring the most money into their branding...
How Headline Language Shapes Perception Of Stories
We found, for example, saying “Scientists believe methane emissions soared to a record in 2021” led readers to view methane levels as more a...
AI Bots Are Flooding The Web With Fake Reviews And Comments
We found AdVon had been running a similar operation at the magazine Sports Illustrated, publishing product reviews using bylines of fake writers with fictional biographies and AI-generated profile...
Visitors Buying Tickets To Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum Scammed By Fraudsters
Around 50 people sounded the alarm to the institution after coming across an imitation website purporting to sell tickets to see Van Gogh’s greatest...
100-Year-Old Sam Ash Music Stores To Close
Derek Ash, whose great-grandparents, Sam and Rose Ash, opened the first Sam Ash store in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1924, said the...
Peter Schjeldahl: Why Frank Stella Mattered
Arriving at the all-time peak of American hegemony in world art, Stella was the poster prodigy of a new breed of artists: post-bohemian, university-trained,...
ByteDance Sues US Government Over TikTok Ban
ByteDance has said it can’t and won’t sell its U.S. operations by the deadline, leaving litigation as its best hope to maintain its U.S. market. The lawsuit accuses...
Reaching For Historical Parallels: Why Thucydides Still Resonates
Thucydides knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is...
The British Museum’s Blockbuster Wars
In the past year or so, the British Museum has been wrestling—often in public, and often to its considerable embarrassment—with what might be characterized...
Does The World Really Need Literary Criticism?
If we look at the longer history of the study of literature... it’s only at the very end of the 20th century that we...
Is The Art World Obsessed With Making Us Feel Bad?
Plenty of art today shows us how terrible the world is, and we eat it up. Maurizio Cattelan knows this, and will gladly take...
The Many Crises Facing Opera
"The orchestral sector and the opera and ballet sectors are facing a funding crisis at the moment, which might mean that the focus is...
Le Monde Started Translating Its Stories Into English. Here’s What It Learned
"We feel that our reporting is good enough to exist globally and we feel that it's important to add a different perspective than the...
After Recent Events, What Will Academic Freedom Look Like?
Professors and students have a right to express themselves on campuses but universities have restricted when and how they can do so, with limitations...
Work Sucks. But What Could Replace It?
It’s no wonder that anti-work thought has gained such traction in recent years. - The New Yorker
When The Writer Attempts To Do The Thing
Nicholson Baker is a professional writer who has become an amateur artist. It is hard to get good at one art form, harder still...
A Musicologist Explains Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter
At 78 minutes, Cowboy Carter is nearly as long as composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s epic Seventh Symphony (1941) and has structural similarities to symphonic music...