326 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
A few weeks ago we posted a link in ArtsJournal to a piece in the Toronto Star under the admittedly provocative headline: “Time To Retire Beethoven’s Ninth?” In the piece, …
Last Week: Have performing arts centers led us to a dead end?… The new World Trade Center in New York demonstrates much of what is wrong with building today’s cities… The h…
Following on Joe Horowitz’s essay Lincoln Center Snapshot: Bing, Bernstein, and Balanchine Fifty Years Later and the five responses to his provocation, we’re in El Paso, Te…
In his essay looking back on Lincoln Center on its 50th birthday, Joe Horowitz suggests that the cultural citadel built optimistically to be a launching pad for the American performing ar…
As recently as 1990, American symphony orchestras accounted for an average of 60 percent of their budgets in earned income. This meant, at the time, that if you weren’t selling enough …
This Week: Trump, the arts, the culture budget and protest… Harvard ART school gets suspended…MIT’s list of 10 things you need to know… Writers and money – the …
So it begins. A report in The Hill, then picked up in the Washington Post, says that the Trump administration intends to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowm…
Unquestionably, a majority of the people who work in Hollywood lean politically left. More than lean, in many cases. But how much of their politics makes it onto the big screen? Rory Carroll…
This Week: The Trump era is a challenge to America’s arts institutions… Artificial intelligence is teaching us how to better-design concert halls… How originality has faile…
This Week: Mozart outsells every CD this year?… How artificial intelligence is changing thinking… Why should artists be entrepreneurs?… How the West dominated global cultur…
This Week: Two stories worth noting – the segregation of DC theatre audiences and what it might tell us… The translation of live theatre to the small screen is more than just fil…
This Week: The next wave of arts journalism layoffs begins… Lots of debate about the role of artists in the Trump era… Prominent Canadian artists petition the government to ̶…
This Week: Did settling the Pittsburgh Symphony strike just kick the can down the road?… The idea of progress is a fragile (and recent) notion… Why should this arts funding depen…
This Week: That Mike Pence goes to “Hamilton” story? A textbook protest… Finally – some real data on the health of orchestras… Arts criticism is either being re…
This Week: Hard to imagine there are arts headlines to compete with election news, but here goes: Science tries to explain why we’re ideologically segregated… It’s not just…
This Week: Record ticket sales at the Chicago Symphony but still a budget problem…Wall Street Journal cuts arts coverage and Boston Globe gets a subsidized critic…Why did Shakesp…
This Week: Why has dance attendance fallen off a cliff in New York?… Applications for MFA programs are down and things are looking bleak… Has our ad-supported business model for …
This Week: Did Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature expand the category to songwriting?… Artists protest against gentrification… We’re deeply conflicted about t…
This Week: The movie industry is undergoing a top-to-bottom revolution… Claim: teaching humanities fights racism… Outing the identity of Elena Ferrante sparks debate on privacy…
This Week: Three orchestras now on strike as audience waits… Two other orchestras report record success… A museum raises $100 million in just three months… Bots are getting…
I suggested in a post this week that, based on the lack of any arts business before the 114th US Congress, that it appears that lobbying for the arts seems to be failing. Yes, the NEA/…
Americans for the Arts Action Fund PAC has released its 2016 Congressional Arts Report Card rating members of Congress on their support for the arts. Many lobby groups do such rankings as a …
This Week: Why is it so hard to tell if American theatre is thriving or not?… Have art and technology had a falling out?… Perhaps TV is the solution to our political polarizat…
Is reality just a construct of the online world or is the online world merely an overlay on reality? Every new technological advance that extends our reach also imposes previously unnecessar…
There’s been a change in the news coming out of symphony orchestras over the past summer. Usually there’s a background drumbeat of struggle as orchestras fight to stay alive. But…