326 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
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…
Existential crises have a way of forcing clarity. Whether the arts and the larger creative world are in crisis I leave for you to decide. But with weekly news of financial and organizational…
This week, ArtsJournal looked at thousands of stories and collected 118 stories across culture. This is one person's attempt to make sense of them.
The fear and concern are real. The issues are real. But we're trying to conjure up rules for 21st Century technologies with a 20th-Century vocabulary that's ill-equipped for the job.
In the evolving world of AI, marketing is moving from getting messages out to engaging in dialog with the consumer. Messages get lost in the Sea of Messages. Persuasion asks what you're inte…
If 2025 is the year that 20th Century culture models stopped working, 2026 is the year we turn to building something new.
We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises"the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in …
Museums still operate as if interpretation is a one-way stream, produced by experts and consumed by the public. Instead, imagine an exhibition that doesn't just speak, but listens and respon…
Like it or not, Disney's move is a big step closer to what an AI creative world might look like.
Everyone's talking about AI, and you're being pestered to use it every time you open your phone. But are you aware the extent that AI has taken over how much of what you see and hear online?
Notions of ownership of creative work, ideas, and artistic identity are muddied when the technology rapidly outpaces attempts to define issues and even what's at stake.
Throughout the digital age, Big Tech has promised us products that will make us more efficient and save time, which, it is assumed, is always an obvious good. It's a cliché that tools shape…
Art that is primarily skill-based -- graphic design, stock music or images, text and marketing, etc -- can be created faster and often better than human artists, and at lower cost. This is p…
The Digital Twin idea is the notion of looking at something -- an organization, an eco-system, a city -- and measuring and defining it in as many meaningful ways as possible and creating a d…
Pre-internet, the lines were pretty clear about the binary relationship between artist and audience. Artists created and audience consumed. In today's digital world, the landscape is fluid"w…
Classical music has lost a generation's worth of music lovers beginning in the late-90s with the rise of file-sharing and Napster. A significant part of the reason might be: metadata. Metada…
"Content" is a Silicon Valley weasel word that suggests that nothing has any intrinsic worth or quality -- every digital byte is equal and interchangeable -- until it draws attention as meas…
To an AI model, a picture is data, sound and music are data, as is traditional spoken or written language. That data is translatable, interchangeable, and, most importantly, linkable and act…
What would a strategy for the arts sector be for anticipating artificial intelligence, if consensus seems to be it will change everything?
Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Apple and Google have subsidized what they offer (super-cheap or free content, faster service and better accessibility) to capture audience…
