330 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festival and we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to a few …
Over on Slate this week Brian Wise posted a piece about Donald Trump and his playing of Puccini’s Nussun Dorma at campaign events. Trump had been using a recording of Pavarotti singing…
Are the arts about selling tickets to shows or about art? Of course performances and exhibitions don’t happen if they don’t have money to be produced, but – as evidenced at…
A 2015 survey by blogger Mae Mai reported that 260 new opera companies started since 2000 in the United States. There are 80 opera companies now working in New York alone. Over the pas…
As the digital world pummels us with more information and choice, many of us react by walling off the things we simply won’t pay attention to. It’s a survival strategy. We increa…
This Week: In an age of artists what is the definition of being an artist?… Canadian study says arts workers are most at risk… What is R&D in the arts?… Edinburgh Festi…
This week: How did our culture get to the point we don’t trust facts?… Are artists actually detrimental to neighborhoods?… Our notions of “greatness” need an ov…
This week: A penetrating portrait of artist Chuck Close, a reality check on meritocracy as a concept, a look at anger and our access to visceral emotion in a media-saturated world, the endur…
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, several French artists were asked to design a series of cards that would imagine what life would be like 100 years in the future in the year 2000. T…
This week: What ethical responsibilities do funders and funded have to one another?… The gatekeeper problem is still a thing in the internet age… What should the measure of su…
This week: Alas, hard work probably doesn’t trump innate ability… It’s tempting to believe extravagant claims for technology, but there are limits… Yes, by all means …
Clearly Brexit is a cultural decision, and it will have a big impact… A new jazz scene emerges and re-energizes the art form… There’s a practical reason there are so few wo…
Can computers help us better understand art? What the world thinks is creative. Why is it still okay to discriminate against stupid people? How gaming is taking over. And the “Rotten T…
Maybe our biggest problem with teaching music in schools is the way we teach it. Hollywood thought making blockbusters would save it. Surprise! How charity auctions take advantage of artists…
I would say based on the thousands of stories we sift through every day at ArtsJournal, diversity and cultural equity (along with funding) are right now probably the biggest issues being tal…
A new music director for the Met Opera, and what it means. A looming college crisis and what it means. How art is changing politics. Is art driving ISIS? And flooding threatened the Louvre, …
When arts planning becomes the point rather than the process. Why your creativity may be dependent on being bored. Are MFA degrees a waste of time if you want to be an artist? Broadway break…
Why aren’t the arts something we can all get behind? Maybe it’s somewhere in the psychology of how we like what we like? Revealed: nobody reads arts reviews anymore (says an edit…
Disrupting the orchestra model, doing away with artistic directors, a cure for what ails the Met Opera, how our ideas about knowledge are changing, and recreating Leonardo (no kidding!) What…
This week: a great example of the de-monetization of audience, the deadening burden of being a critic, some contradictions about how we use data in the arts, why technology is complicating o…
What Does “Inclusive” Mean To A Performing Arts Center? The Kennedy Center held an event to talk about inclusiveness of its offerings. But no one seemed to be able to define exac…
This week: Do the Met Museum’s financial woes say anything about today’s museum business? Who wants to see art in mobbed museums anyway? Prince’s career as a control freak.…
This week, a groundbreaking deal for Broadway actors and dancers, James Levine finally decides to retire from the Met Opera, a debacle at the National Ballet of Romania that quickly escal…
What business success in theatre looks like, our over-obsession with creativity as a catch-all answer to success, how the art markets really work, how taste gets confused with pretension, an…
A number of stories this week tackled the meaning of greatness in art (even if they didn’t explicitly frame it that way). A changing culture requires changing definitions of greatness,…
