Author: Douglas McLennan

Of Critics, Bullies And Trolls – How Do You Tell Which Is Which?

Famous people who spend a lot of time online become especially defensive; experts point to the explosion of social media for the increase in conflating bullies with critics. After all, bullying has been around forever. Now, there are just more opportunities for anyone to weigh in on any subject they want, and it’s far more likely the intended target will see or hear the criticism. – Washington Post

Indigenous Australian Artists: It’s Time We Stop Being Reviewed By White Culture

“It feels like a moment where we are angry and ready enough to address how white Australian review culture maligns Indigenous work by only superficially engaging with it. It feels like a moment where we are ready to sustain our own review culture. We have centuries of white engagement with Indigenous story as evidence for the need to change; we also have our own critics, who show us what’s possible when whiteness loses its frame of evaluative authority over a work.” – The Guardian

Overnight Reviews Are Largely A Thing Of The Past. Is It A Good Thing?

Is a review dashed out in an hour really going to be as good as one written under a more generous deadline? Sometimes, maybe: I know some critics who think British deadlines are the enemy of decent reviews, but they can underestimate the quality that can be mustered with the adrenaline pumping. Nonetheless, there is something obviously counterintuitive about the idea that the more important the review, the less time will be spent on it. – The Stage

Meet DC’s National Gallery’s First Woman Director

The gallery’s fifth director, Kaywin Feldman thinks that her appointment as the institution’s first woman director broadcasts a commitment to diversity. When she started working in the field 25 years ago, only about 15 percent of museum directors were women; now, according to the AAMD’s 2017 Gender Gap report, 48 percent of museums have female directors—but only 30 percent of museums with annual budgets of $15m and higher, decreasing as budget size increases. Feldman now oversees a museum with a $190m annual operating budget. – The Art Newspaper

Is London’s Proposed New Concert Hall Merely A Play For Bragging Rights?

The scheme is slated to cost nearly £300 million and is London’s volley in an intercontinental game of high culture one-upmanship, which in recent years has produced Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie in Paris. This arms race for cultural dominion has, in London however, reached new levels of absurdity with the decision to build the new 2,000 seat concert hall less than 300 metres from an existing 2,000 seat concert hall. – dezeen

NY’s New Hudson Yards – Architecture As Luxury Branding With A Giant Waste Basket In The Center

Michael Kimmelman: “It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.” – The New York Times