Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Inside Princeton’s Ambitious New Museum
Despite its upgraded size, the redesigned museum never felt daunting. There’s something intimate about how the installation of its collection—one of the oldest in...
So AI Is Coming For Your Job. We Have To Think About Jobs Differently
AI’s automating powers are indiscriminate. They are affecting blue-collar manufacturing jobs and white-collar office jobs. Many who spent years, and thousands of dollars, developing...
Susan Orlean On The Glory Days Of The New Yorker
Orlean allows that if there’s anything anyone should be jealous of, it’s that she had been encouraged to pursue ideas most magazine editors would...
Universal Music Makes Big Licensing Deal With Spotify
“The agreement includes all aspects of YouTube’s various music services and platforms, embodies our artist-centric principles and drives greater monetization for artists and songwriters.”...
We Make Things That Make Life Easier. But There’s A Big Downside…
The more these systems anticipate and deliver what we want, the less we notice what’s missing—or remember that we ever had a choice in...
Harvard Is Cutting Back On PhD’s. That’s A Problem For Academia
Some might be wondering why anyone should care if, for example, the number of Harvard history Ph.D.s drops from 13 to five. Although these...
American Ballet Theatre @85
Ballet Theatre was renamed American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 1957; journalists don’t often use “essay” as a verb anymore (though maybe we should); and...
The Resurrection Of Books-A-Million
The retailer is in the process of opening 15 new outlets this year, which will keep the total number of outlets at over 220...
The Humanities Aren’t A “Vibe!” The Slippery Slope Of AI
The collapse of the institutions where young people learn to make and critique art stands to greatly benefit companies like OpenAI, which, in the...
Trump Is The Most Consequential Art President In Our Lifetime. We Need A Counter...
Merely nine months in, the Trump administration is poised to become the most consequential, effective arts presidency in American history—peerless in impact since at...
We Used To Be An Oral Culture. Then We Read. Now We’re Going Back...
For most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered....
Belgium’s Gorgeous New Calatrava Train Station
Conceptualised by Calatrava as a "monumental bridge", its volume traverses a series of 350-metre-long platforms and bus stops that extend outwards from the gallery's underside. -...
Wexner Center Director Resigns, Effective Immediately
Gaëtane Verna inherited a Wexner facing financial turmoil worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The center’s fiscal health and workplace culture appeared to deteriorate further...
This San Francisco Museum Decided To Be Nomadic
The museum will henceforth be presenting exhibitions in new spaces each cycle. The intent behind this is both to pair artistic projects with architecturally...
Why We’re Having Difficulty Understanding AI
Cognitivism, which has permeated society—as evidenced by the omnipresence of the terms “cognitive” and “cognition”—has perpetuated a traditional view of thought and intelligence as...
A Prominent Arts College Offers An AI Major. There’s Pushback
According to SCAD, the Applied AI program will prepare students for professions including AI product developer, AI design strategist, AI story engineer, autonomous agent...
Lebrecht: Two Nominations For 21st Century Great Composer Status
In an increasingly authoritarian age, we are suspicious of new leaders; when posterity squints back at us it will have to fumble in the...
Museum Employees Are Unhappy. Is It Getting Better?
Fifty-four percent of museum employees have considered quitting their jobs in the last five years, and more than one-quarter of full-time workers earn salaries...
What We’re Losing In A Post-Literate Culture
By now we’ve moved beyond a post-literature culture into what some are calling a post-literate age, taking us back several thousand years to communication...
A Dramatic Decline In Thinking?
If we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately...
New JFK Terminal Will Be Full Of A-List Art
The swish new $9.5 billion terminal currently in the works at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Port Authority of New York...
Chicago’s Grant Park Music CEO Is Stepping Down After Transforming The Festival
Paul Winberg is credited with tripling the festival’s annual contributions, bolstering its administrative infrastructure and overseeing a key change in artistic leadership last year....
What Does The Philadelphia Museum Of Art’s Rebrand Signal?
The change may seem cosmetic, but as a marketing scholar at Temple University whose research focuses on branding and digital marketing strategy, I know that in...
Complexity: How Do You Measure AI?
AI measurement is a new field, and everything is still under contention—not just how we test but what we should be testing for. - The...
How We Know What We Know: What Is Common Knowledge?
Common knowledge — awareness of mutual understanding — can explain the emergence of social-media shaming mobs, academic cancel culture and revolutions that seem to erupt...
