320 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century. The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once. Now there may no choice. But what's the case?
Culture awards of all kinds have been steadily losing their currency over the past decade. So what's going on?
By revenue, the nonprofit arts sector is small — about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney's annual revenue a…
Depth hasn't disappeared. Perhaps it's gone lateral. The vertical architecture that produced "official" cultural memory has cracked, but the appetite for tradition — for context, for linea…
Most arts policy debates happen at one scale. Most cultural activity happens at another. It turns out the gap between those two scales — between the world that the arts, funding fights, an…
We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million dea…
LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkab…
The threat isn't that AI replaces artists. It's subtler and more coercive: that an algorithmically saturated environment erodes the capacity for the kind of thinking that we like to think ar…
Old systems of certification are failing from every direction: technological, legal, institutional and political. So what's left when you can't just say "trust us"? You have to show your wor…
The first audience for your art is becoming a machine. The question isn't just how to optimize for that machine, it's what you give it to say, and whether what it says is worth a conversatio…
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I think defining what we mean by excellence really matters if we're going to figure out the place of AI in creativity. Four stories this week suggest layers …
The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences " legal, technical, financial, corporate " was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunica…
This week we collected 118 stories. It's worth noting, I think, that attempts to address the current collapse of the non-profit culture sector are focused on changing market forces. But this…
Ireland demonstrated something: economic insecurity doesn't just force workers out, it diminishes the overall creative economy. That matters enormously right now, because we are entering a p…
These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. This week we collected 118 stories. Here's what I learned:
Two huge culture industry deals in the past week, both in entertainment, and maybe they don't seem connected. Certainly not connected to non-profit arts. But these are exactly the kind of cu…
The Boston Symphony's board didn't fire Andris Nelsons as its music director. Not exactly. They declined to renew his contract because he and the BSO weren't "aligned on future vision" " the…
Authorship used to be a status granted by an act of creation. Now it will be a status you will have to defend through paperwork. We have moved from the era of the romantic "lone genius" to t…
Evidence abounds this week that the battles for culture are intensifying. Taken together, these tests of authority over cultural institutions are probes of where the line is, of how much se…
The question isn't whether AI will change our definition of creative excellence. The question is how we will engage with that change: with curiously and critical insight, with our existing v…
My weekly pondering on arts and cultural stories for the week of February 22nd.
That shift from content value to traffic value is what has destroyed the business model for nearly everything we're talking about. I'm calling it a manifesto because that's what it needs to …
This week there's a question that connects nearly every story. Who gets to decide what's real? A viral AI-generated video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt is racking up views. Neither actor …
My weekly essay reflecting on arts stories of the past week.
In the space of a week, we have lost two significant and iconic American institutions. But the shuttering of the Kennedy Center and the decimation of the Washington Post are neither isolated…
