319 stories by "Douglas McLennan"
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,…
This week’s best reads hover around existential questions. What arts organizations should exist? Does truth exist? Can theatre really change anything, and should it even try? Canada…
My picks for the five most interesting stories we gathered this week. The Arts’ Existential Challenge Arts organizations, along with every business sector trying to cope with sweeping …
Researchers find links between what you watch and how you behave, how women are changing classical music, fascinating fights over who owns Picasso, a Golden Age for New York theatre, and con…
New York gets its first new major museum in decades. English National Opera continues its slow-motion implosion. The relationship between art and critics frays. Some counter-intuitive findin…
Arguably, the dominant cultural issue of our time is the changes in how people are finding and getting culture. Â In response, business models supporting culture and the kinds of culture b…
1. Is Funding Really The Top Issue In The Arts? Doug Borwick says no. “Insufficiency of funds will never go away. It's a state of being in the nonprofit sector. Overfocus on this a…
Anyone you know like ads? No. They’re the cackling crows getting between you and what you’re after. They’re uninvited, unwelcome, and we do whatever we can to swat them awa…
Adam Grant, in his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World writes about the necessity of anchoring new ideas in familiar things. To generate creative ideas, it's import…
1. This week in What-Does-The-Audience-Want? Cheaper tickets, for sure. Or at least the opportunity to pay what they want. Â One theatre converted its season to pay-as-you-want and saw a 5…
Ah, an old-fashioned press-banning. Feels like the good old days. Of the 162 stories we collected this week, a few memes emerged: It was the week of artistic directors in dance. First,…
Last week we conducted our first ArtsJournal poll, asking: What’s the biggest challenge facing the arts? We had 3,191 votes, with the largest percentage – 37% – answering f…
