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]
Saturday, February 7, 2026

Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra by Douglas McLennan

In the space of a week, we have lost two significant and iconic American institutions. But the shuttering of the Kennedy Center and the decimation of the Washington Post are neither isolated…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:31AM[SHARE]
Sunday, February 1, 2026

This Week's AJ Chronicles: Context is Survival by Douglas McLennan

Existential crises have a way of forcing clarity. Whether the arts and the larger creative world are in crisis I leave for you to decide. But with weekly news of financial and organizational…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:42AM[SHARE]
Saturday, January 24, 2026

AJ Chronicles: This Week in the Great Culture Shift by Douglas McLennan

This week, ArtsJournal looked at thousands of stories and collected 118 stories across culture. This is one person's attempt to make sense of them.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:06PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Old Laws, New Ghosts: Why Artists are losing the Battle for AI by Douglas McLennan

The fear and concern are real. The issues are real. But we're trying to conjure up rules for 21st Century technologies with a 20th-Century vocabulary that's ill-equipped for the job.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:36AM[SHARE]
Thursday, January 8, 2026

An AI "Digital Twin" for the Performing Arts by Douglas McLennan

In the evolving world of AI, marketing is moving from getting messages out to engaging in dialog with the consumer. Messages get lost in the Sea of Messages. Persuasion asks what you're inte…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:48PM[SHARE]
Sunday, January 4, 2026

The Great Renegotiation: Five Ideas about where Culture is going in 2026 by Douglas McLennan

If 2025 is the year that 20th Century culture models stopped working, 2026 is the year we turn to building something new.

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:32PM[SHARE]
Thursday, January 1, 2026

From 30,000 Feet: Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025 by Douglas McLennan

We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises"the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in …

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:54AM[SHARE]
Saturday, December 27, 2025

AI that turns Museums into Conversations: The Digital Twin by Douglas McLennan

Museums still operate as if interpretation is a one-way stream, produced by experts and consumed by the public. Instead, imagine an exhibition that doesn't just speak, but listens and respon…

SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 12:24AM[SHARE]

All that Chat

2025-2026 BROADWAY SEASON
Jun 12, 2025: Call Me Izzy - Studio 54
Sep 16, 2025: Art - Music Box Theatre
Oct 08, 2025: Beetlejuice - Palace Theatre
Nov 13, 2025: Oedipus - Studio 54
Nov 16, 2025: Chess - Imperial Theatre
Mar 23, 2026: Giant - Music Box Theatre
Apr 06, 2026: Becky Shaw - Hayes Theater
Apr 16, 2026: Proof - Booth Theatre
Apr 26, 2026: Drama Desk Cut-Off