Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Ethical Considerations For AI in Art
Striking a balance between leveraging AI for creative enhancement and preserving the human element in art is a critical ethical consideration related to creative...
Why Are Theatre Audiences Behaving So Badly?
Perhaps there’s a feeling that, having spent upwards of, say, 180 quid on a pair of tickets for something, they’re entitled to a five...
Australia’s Live Music Venues Being Squeezed Out By Increasing Insurance Costs
While some people’s bar-going and spending habits have shifted since the pandemic (not everyone is returning to their regular bar or pub-going routines), by...
Linguists Pick Their (Admittedly Quirky) Word Of The Year
In contrast to the prominent dictionaries that designated as their word of the year “rizz,” “hallucinate” and “authentic,” the American Dialect Society celebrates linguistic variation to...
A New Generation Of Architecture Wars
Architecture has been hit by a new sobriety. Tradition, apparently, is back. The reaction against ultramodern architecture arrived slowly at first, but accelerated with...
AI Writing May Be Aesthetically Pleasing But Incoherent. Okay With That?
The device has no way of knowing what its words refer to, as humans would, or even what it means for words to refer...
Maxine Mahon, 82, San Diego Dance Doyenne
For 50 years, Maxine Mahon was San Diego’s doyenne of dance as the founder and director of California Ballet Co., which despite its closure...
You Don’t Need To “Know” About Art. It’s Just The Way It Works
I find that the less I say about my music, the better. If I say anything, it tends to be oblique or oracular: words...
Poland’s Court Refuses Government Plan To Liquidate Public Broadcaster
The decision marks a further legal blow to the new government’s efforts to regain control of public media from the former ruling Law and...
What If We Removed The Politics From Social Media?
Most social media algorithms are programmed to optimise the spread of inflammatory content, “fuelling the maelstrom of online political debate and, despite what the...
Remembering The Outsized Impact Of Diane Ragsdale
As an activist-thinker, Diane understood the ecologies of culture. She mapped them at the intersection of aesthetics, economics, and ethics, circling versions of the...
Marketing And Hype Are Overwhelming The Creative Economy
Rather than cajole or badger, campaigns now invite consumers to join the conversation. They’ve recognized that anyone can amplify their message, whether through social...
Celebrities Are Mad About AI Deepfakes. Congress Might Make A Law (Uh-Oh)
The new bill, called the No AI FRAUD Act and introduced by Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), would establish legal definitions...
Director Norman Jewison, 97
Jewison, whose career began in Canadian television and spanned more than 50 years, was, like his close friend Sidney Lumet and a select few other directors,...
Tanya Berezin, Broadway Force, 82
At the Circle Repertory Company, where she said her goal was to “confuse people,” she nurtured a new generation of writers and actors in...
Pitchfork Was Iconic. So What? The Kids Have Moved On From Reviews Of Any...
Forget the death of newspapers and magazines (that’s old news about old news), we are now in the end of the era of websites...
Speculating On The Whitney Museum’s Murky Handling Of The Hopper Estate
The museum simply used me to avoid the scandal that would result if the public learned that many works said to be by Hopper...
Netflix Is A Giant. But The Streaming Business Has Gotten Significantly More Difficult
To be Netflix these days is to occupy the strange dichotomy of being a company that has won the war but still has plenty of...
A Heroic Effort To Save Pittsburgh’s National Opera House, Home To A Rich African-American...
It was supposed to cost $3 million to flip the house from a crumbling ruin to a vibrant community center with musical performances and...
How A Small Technical Change By Apple Sent Podcast Listener Stats Plummeting
A user who listened to a show a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under...
Study: Kids’ Reading Comprehension Goes Up Reading Physical Books Compared To Reading on Screens
A soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University’s Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for “deeper reading” there is a clear...
How Apple Could Win Back The Music Business From Spotify (And Pay Musicians)
In his plan, Apple would take each subscriber's monthly fee and distribute 90% to the artists that subscriber listened to that month (pro rata based on...
A Window On The Future Of Opera
Even when all might be lost in a hopeless desert of lifeless toxic sludge, the future feels bright. - Washington Post
A Brief History Of American Dialects
Myriad factors influence variations among American accents and dialects, including waves of settlement in a region, geographic location and class differences. - Smithsonian
UK Theatres Gasping To Restructure After Devasting Year
The Royal Court says it' seeking to "find new business models to sustain the theatre", while Hampstead has said 2022/23 turned out to be...