326 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
Maestro isn't really a movie about Leonard Bernstein or his career, or even about music per se. It's not really a "biopic," in the traditional Hollywood sense of the word.
We're entering a new age of global communication, and universal translators are only the first step. Avatars and synthetics will be as routine as today's TikTok video filters.
At the moment "how to think about it" may be the most important place to start.
Infinite choice of music in a few clicks sounds like a dream. In reality it can dull your desire and lead to what the social psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the "paradox of choice," a kind…
Our consumption of culture has never been higher. So why are culture producers melting down?
It might seem like our current information glut is without parallel, but throughout history observers have worried about the impact of too much information on our ability to rationally proce…
How has COVID changed what people want when they decide to put down their screens and go out? We'll explore what Edinburgh thinks it is.Â
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Oil prices are at a record high. And profits are rolling in. But there's an intriguing phenomenon in the oil industry called "demand destruction." It means when prices get too high for too l…
Is it the subscription model that's not working or is it the way the arts do subscriptions?
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This week's podcast of The UnderTow, ArtsJournal's new weekly podcast, features three stories from the past week. Sometimes stories are not exactly about the things they seem to be about at …
Today we introduce a new podcast -- ArtsJournal's "The UnderTow" - a more or less weekly deeper look at two or three stories from the past week.
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There are plenty of strategic reasons to use hybrid content to further artistic goals that don't have to be around making money. But ultimately the model, whatever it is, has to make sense.
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The arts workforce, and those being recruited into it, is changing. "We've never had as many openings at one time. And we recognize that in hiring so many positions at once, we have a huge r…
Many arts organizations are coming out of the COVID shutdown in better financial shape than they were going in.
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Over the past year, while compiling 150,000 stories in the AJ archives, I realized that this is a unique record of an extraordinary period in our cultural history. Sorry " that sounds grandi…
You might think this is just a journalism issue, but one can draw parallels of paying to read stories to paying for music streaming, which has not proven to "pay off" for the vast majority o…
I was asked to deliver a "provocation" for this week's League of American Orchestras annual conference with the prompt "How has Technology Changed Orchestras Forever?" Here's a video of the…
We need a significant, stable ongoing source of new funding that is politically insulated and inflation-proof.
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The shutdown has suspended usual rules, positions and behaviors, suggesting there may be opportunities to not just rethink but take action.
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Opera America had asked me to speak at their annual conference this year, but of course the conference was canceled and moved online. So I made this video for the online conference, talking …
So your workplace has shut down (your theatre, concert hall museum, stage, whatever). Now what? Moving online is the obvious play. And in the weeks since lockdown there has been a flood of a…
You can see this as nothing but loss. Or perhaps some of our most intractable debates are now suddenly shaken free of their old moorings.
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A few months ago I was at a conference of administrators of large arts institutions when a leading researcher in cultural trends made a bold claim: The election of Donald Trump is a result o…
The tide has turned on the tech revolution. Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the D…
This week Washington Post arts journalists Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone published results of their six-month investigation of sexual harassment in the classical music business. Some of th…
