All stories by Douglas McLennan on BroadwayStars

Sunday, August 2, 2026

AJ Chronicles: When Selling Out Is No Longer a Business Model by Douglas McLennan

The Paramount merger and Broadway and non-profit theatre are strangely arguments circling the same idea. Paramount essentially argues that there's no such thing as the movie business anymore…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 12:40AM[SHARE]
Sunday, July 5, 2026

AJ Chronicles: So What’s Working in this Arts Bear Market? by Douglas McLennan

When you look across the culture at what is gaining traction, some common themes emerge.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:05AM[SHARE]
Tuesday, June 30, 2026

AJ Chronicles: It’s Getting Expensive to Prove You’re a Human Artist by Douglas McLennan

We're now focused on "doping tests" to determine if artists have cheated. Rather than pee in a bottle, however, we're depending on AI detector tools and documentary proof of human creation. …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:20AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, June 17, 2026

AJ Chronicles: There’s no Shortage of Art. We Ran Out of Ways to Find It. by Douglas McLennan

The major disconnect of contemporary culture: Findability has detached from the ability of traditional cultural narratives to agree on what's important. Instead of art evolving in coherent s…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:15AM[SHARE]
Sunday, June 7, 2026

AJ Chronicles: A New Policy to Eliminate Arguments for the Arts by Douglas McLennan

This notion that the ultimate measure of American educational value is economic is an impoverishing one. We measure for success. If that measure is earnings then we optimize for earnings. So…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:20PM[SHARE]
Thursday, June 4, 2026

Is Trump’s Wreckage of the Kennedy Center an Opportunity for Something Better? by Douglas McLennan

The Kennedy Center is a treasure. Not just for what it has been, but because of what it represents. But the practicalities of providing a roof for a bunch of artistic enterprises that essent…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:25AM[SHARE]
Sunday, May 31, 2026

AJ Chronicles: Google Just Changed the way We’re Going to Find Culture by Douglas McLennan

What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how w…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:40AM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 23, 2026

AJ Chronicles: Hollywood, 6; Non-Profit Arts, 1 by Douglas McLennan

Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century. The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once. Now there may no choice. But what's the case?

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:55PM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 9, 2026

AJ Chronicles: The Venice Biennale Blows Up — Some Takeaways by Douglas McLennan

Culture awards of all kinds have been steadily losing their currency over the past decade. So what's going on?

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:25PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, May 6, 2026

So Just How Big is the Culture Audience? (comparisons that may make you rethink) by Douglas McLennan

By revenue, the nonprofit arts sector is small — about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney's annual revenue a…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:20PM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 2, 2026

AJ Chronicles: Are Our Attention Spans Killing Culture or Reassembling It? by Douglas McLennan

Depth hasn't disappeared. Perhaps it's gone lateral. The vertical architecture that produced "official" cultural memory has cracked, but the appetite for tradition — for context, for linea…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:41AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Just How Big is the Culture Economy? by Douglas McLennan

Most arts policy debates happen at one scale. Most cultural activity happens at another. It turns out the gap between those two scales — between the world that the arts, funding fights, an…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:30PM[SHARE]
Sunday, April 26, 2026

AJ Chronicles: Perils of Philanthropy — The Metropolitan Opera by Douglas McLennan

We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million dea…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:00AM[SHARE]
Friday, April 24, 2026

LACMA’s New Building: What’s the purpose of art in a Museum? by Douglas McLennan

LACMA proposes a new model for museums. For a long time now, context has been an essential deliverable when you go to a museum. It’s how meaning gets constructed. Just what was so remarkab…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:35PM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 18, 2026

AJ Chronicles: This Week " Perils of the Algorithmic Culture by Douglas McLennan

The threat isn't that AI replaces artists. It's subtler and more coercive: that an algorithmically saturated environment erodes the capacity for the kind of thinking that we like to think ar…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:18PM[SHARE]
Sunday, April 12, 2026

AJ Chronicles: How to Fight the Slop by Douglas McLennan

Old systems of certification are failing from every direction: technological, legal, institutional and political. So what's left when you can't just say "trust us"? You have to show your wor…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:03AM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 8, 2026

From Messages to Conversations: AI Agents are Changing how we Find Culture by Douglas McLennan

The first audience for your art is becoming a machine. The question isn't just how to optimize for that machine, it's what you give it to say, and whether what it says is worth a conversatio…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:32AM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 4, 2026

AJ Chronicles: The Excellence Problem and Why it Matters by Douglas McLennan

I don't mean to be pedantic, but I think defining what we mean by excellence really matters if we're going to figure out the place of AI in creativity. Four stories this week suggest layers …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:12PM[SHARE]
Saturday, March 28, 2026

AJ Chronicles: Why Tech Infrastructure is the Most Important Arts Story of the Year by Douglas McLennan

The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences " legal, technical, financial, corporate " was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunica…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:54PM[SHARE]
Sunday, March 22, 2026

AJ Chronicles: What Habermas Feared for our Public Sphere by Douglas McLennan

This week we collected 118 stories. It's worth noting, I think, that attempts to address the current collapse of the non-profit culture sector are focused on changing market forces. But this…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 12:06PM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 19, 2026

What Ireland's Basic Artist Income Experiment tells us about a new Arts Economy by Douglas McLennan

Ireland demonstrated something: economic insecurity doesn't just force workers out, it diminishes the overall creative economy. That matters enormously right now, because we are entering a p…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:06PM[SHARE]
Sunday, March 15, 2026

AJ Chronicles: The Biggest Fights about Culture by Douglas McLennan

These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. This week we collected 118 stories. Here's what I learned:

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:18AM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 12, 2026

Paramount and Live Nation/Ticketmaster Won Big Last Week: Here's why Orchestras and Theatres (and Consumers) Lost by Douglas McLennan

Two huge culture industry deals in the past week, both in entertainment, and maybe they don't seem connected. Certainly not connected to non-profit arts. But these are exactly the kind of cu…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:32PM[SHARE]
Saturday, March 7, 2026

AJ Chronicles: "Future Vision" and what the Boston Symphony signaled this week by Douglas McLennan

The Boston Symphony's board didn't fire Andris Nelsons as its music director. Not exactly. They declined to renew his contract because he and the BSO weren't "aligned on future vision" " the…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 12:42PM[SHARE]
Monday, March 2, 2026

Did the Supreme Court just unleash the Era of Radioactive Artist IP? by Douglas McLennan

Authorship used to be a status granted by an act of creation. Now it will be a status you will have to defend through paperwork. We have moved from the era of the romantic "lone genius" to t…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:18PM[SHARE]
Saturday, February 28, 2026

AJ Chronicles: The Battles for Who gets to say what Culture Is by Douglas McLennan

Evidence abounds this week that the battles for culture are intensifying. Taken together, these tests of authority over cultural institutions are probes of where the line is, of how much se…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:31PM[SHARE]
Monday, February 23, 2026

When "Better Than" meets "Good Enough" 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…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:12PM[SHARE]
Saturday, February 21, 2026

AJ Chronicles: The Metropolitan Opera as Poster Child by Douglas McLennan

My weekly pondering on arts and cultural stories for the week of February 22nd.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:42PM[SHARE]
Monday, February 16, 2026

The Middleware Manifesto: A Proposal for Rebuilding American Culture by Douglas McLennan

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 …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:42AM[SHARE]
Sunday, February 15, 2026

AJ Chronicles: This Week's Stories " Changing of the Guard by Douglas McLennan

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 …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:36PM[SHARE]
Sunday, February 8, 2026

AJ Chronicles: This week's stories " When Spectacle replaces Authority by Douglas McLennan

My weekly essay reflecting on arts stories of the past week.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:12PM[SHARE]

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