This week we collected 139 stories on ArtsJournal. Here’s what I learned:

It’s difficult to deny that something structural is failing the arts. Week after week we’ve been documenting a collapse across the sector that transcends any simple bad management. The entire infrastructure is collapsing.

And yet, there are also success stories. Many of them. So this week I want to look at some of those successes and see if there are commonalities.

Tate Modern’s Frida Kahlo retrospective recently broke the museum’s all-time pre-sale record of 41,000 tickets. The same week, 80,000 people stood in a nine-hour online queue for the chance to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. But blockbusters are supposed to be dead?

Then there’s the Vegas Sphere, now the highest-grossing arena on the planet, posting an astonishing $386.4 million in revenue in just the first quarter of 2026. What these three share is that they’re selling occasion.

When you look across the culture at what is gaining traction, some common themes emerge. They sell occasion, they sell belonging, and interestingly, they sell permission.

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Start with occasion. Gen Z, the generation that grew up surrounded by screens in their playpens, were supposed to be lost to the algorithm. But surprise, Gen Z is now the most frequent moviegoing cohort in America: 87 percent saw a movie in a theater in the past year, compared to 58 percent of boomers. Movie theatre box office has surged this year, and one exhibitor’s explanation is almost embarrassingly simple: “People want to go out... so they came back in hordes.” Streaming demolished scheduled culture, but in doing so made the time-bound, shared occasion scarce. Scarce things become valuable, and that’s also the appeal of Frida and Bayeux. They’re unique experiences you’ll miss out on if you don’t act.

Then belonging. The number of independent bookstores has nearly tripled in a decade, to their highest level since the 1990s, and in the middle of what many consider is a literacy crisis. The stores aren’t selling books; Amazon sells books cheaper. They’re selling membership in a reading life, a culture. This has trickled up to, of all places, Barnes & Noble, which once was seen as the indy store-killer and is now building new stores at a furious pace. Walk into a B&N and you’ll see crowds gathered in the cafe debating the day’s news. It’s all about community. And let’s return to Gen Z, which is not only flocking to movie theatres, but turning out in droves each week to watch reality TV on the big screen. They cheer and groan over characters they’ve come to follow. The community of Love Island.

This same impulse drives sales of romance audiobooks, the fastest-growing corner of a $2.4 billion audio book market, as well as queer literature, and the country music concerts suddenly filling UK stages. Audiences aren’t really buying artforms or genres so much as they’re hungry for identities that artforms let them belong to.

And then there’s permission. Two Gen Z sisters make ballet breakdown videos whose stated goal is to make viewers “feel equipped to say, ‘I understand what’s going on.’” TikTok has turned Rothko into a personality archetype you can dress as. The Savannah Bananas’ choreographer designs routines that camouflage the players with two left feet. The Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalia has made “opera aesthetics” one of Pinterest’s fastest-growing trends, putting out front the look before the repertoire. These winners invite you in as a novice and make novicehood feel thrilling.

The Pittsburgh Symphony’s live-movie score concerts are now so reliably popular they have added $7 million of predictable revenue to the orchestra’s budget, and attendance at the Orchestra’s flagship classical series is up 14 percent. Tate’s record-breaking Frida is a serious retrospective. And Death of a Salesman just played to 100 percent capacity at the Winter Garden on Broadway.

And the failures this spring also suggest this pattern isn’t just “lighter and cheaper.” Pop music has the most accessible canon on earth, but suddenly concerts and festivals aren’t selling this summer, killed by ticket prices one analyst calls obscene. And another Pittsburgh Symphony example: ticket sales to the orchestra’s pops series — light programming with no canon connection to anyone’s identity — keep falling while the movie score concerts rise. Lighter clearly isn’t the lesson.

So what to make of these examples from a limited sample size from the past few weeks? For a century we’ve sold the art and treated occasion, belonging, and permission as amenities, not drivers of desire. In the above successes, I think the common thread is institutions now selling occasion, belonging, and permission, and treating the art as the payload. It’s not a surrender of standards, it’s a refocusing that acknowledges what’s actually for sale. Nobody in the Bayeux queue was there for the embroidery.

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Record demand won’t fix a broken model. A real caveat to everything above: You can be popular, sell all your tickets and still not make the model work. UK theatres just posted their highest annual attendance ever recorded — 37 million people, with the West End’s 17.64 million running nearly three million ahead of Broadway. But the same report warns that the financial model underneath is failing. Demand is really important, but it isn’t the key to success. An institution can sell every seat and still be structurally insolvent; that’s the cost-disease plague that has spread across the entire performing arts sector. As it stands now, you have to be extraordinary just to survive. How can an industry survive if just the average guarantees failure? LA’s dance scene has seen numerous closures in the past year, with some of its best companies calling it quits. Dance in LA is unsustainable in its current form, and the industry is “on life support.” And no one seems to be paying attention. A visit last week by New York City Ballet didn’t even rate a mention or a review. Anywhere.

The Bananas are out-paying Broadway for Broadway talent. A Tony-nominated actor is now a Savannah Bananas relief pitcher who enters games singing Phantom of the Opera for, as the New York Times dryly notes, likely better pay. This is a market signal: an entertainment brand built on occasion and permission can monetize theatrical craft better than the theater can. When the Bananas value your training more than your industry can, the problem isn’t the training.

Artists now have an increasingly expensive new toll gate to pass through. Last week the Commonwealth Foundation cleared this year’s short story prize winners of “cheating” after allegations that some winning entries were written by AI. The Foundation went back to writers and asked them to hand over drafts, outlines, manuscripts, and other evidence of their creative process, then spent a month poring over the evidence. Then they exonerated the winners. But Granta, the prize’s publishing partner, quit anyway — “for the sake of our own editorial integrity,” it said, ending the partnership.

A troubling story that says a lot about where our culture is right now. 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. Did the Foundation double down to ask what’s the best writing? No. They cared more about how it was made. Perhaps that’s important. Of course it is. But, in a way, it’s now an impossible question. Moreover, it may ultimately be the wrong question.

The AI detector tools are being widely proven as inaccurate. And artist work documentation can be incredibly inconsistent and onerous to produce. The new requirements impose an uneven and time-consuming tax on artists. Some artists are feverish documenters of their process. Others work organically, without notes. So if you’re an artist consumed in your work and you neglect to document, is your work now invalid? If you don’t have the resources to employ approved documentation tools, are you uncertifiable? This is a mess.

Surveys of artists across fields show they’re using AI in their work extensively. And why not? If it helps make work better, it’s hard to resist. In some creative fields, AI is only a small step from technology already in use for years. Movie CGI special effects. Music auto-tune. Photoshop processing of images. Each of these technologies in the hands of amateurs can look and sound amateurish. In the hands of artists they make imagination sing.

In the analog art world, technology is also hard to separate. In many significant ways, the story of art is one of technological progress. The modern symphony orchestra, for example, owes its sound to improving technologies over the course of centuries. A significant reason music from three centuries ago sounds different from a 21st Century orchestra is improvement in instrument technology, which allowed composers and musicians to expand what they were capable of.

AI that critiques and challenges your ideas can make you better. So where is the line? Pre-production AI use that made an idea better is surely undetectable. But is that okay? AI is expert at iterating hundreds, thousands of versions of an idea while an artist works through a concept. Is that cheating?

We’re building mechanisms for certifying that art was made by humans, and it is getting expensive. Contests now demand a documented chain of custody for inspiration. Insurers want proof of human-authorship before they’ll cover productions. The legal ground shifted when the courts held in the Thaler case a few months ago that AI-created work can’t be copyrighted. Artists used to be presumed human. Now they’re asked to document and prove it.

Here’s a problem: increasingly the proof doesn’t mean anything. Detection tools flag human writing and music as machine-made often enough that students and professionals are being falsely accused. And research keeps confirming that people — including experts — can’t reliably tell AI music or prose from the human kind. Spotify just beat a class action alleging billions of bot-inflated listener streams. Meanwhile synthetic AI artists and avatars rack up real plays from real listeners who don’t know or don’t care.

The incentives when it comes to the human/AI creation debate are all also aimed one way: studies report that when audiences learn a song or a story is synthetic, they value it less. So the rational move for an artist using AI is to hide rather than declare it. We’ve built a certification system that punishes honesty but also can’t reliably catch the dishonest.

Missing the Point?

This is all a mess. And yet, I think it ultimately misses the point. The backlash against AI is huge right now. For all sorts of very understandable reasons. I think this is a good thing: it’s forcing us — for the first time in a long time — to debate the basic values of art. What we expect art to do. How art should be created. What are the qualities that determine good art. Who can create art. Most of these questions aren’t new, but the prospect of non-humans making things has forced us to be more explicit about, really, defining what art is and what it does.

And sorting out what art is made by machine and what by human has a purpose, I guess. We want to know, as we have this debate about values, so we can figure out what’s important.

But I go back to the fights we had as journalism entered the digital age. So much of the debate about digital journalism was about the journalists, the need to save jobs, the importance of the news gathering process. These were all very important. But ultimately all the market cared about was the journalism itself, not the journalists.

The argument seemed almost always about preserving the making: the newsroom jobs, the trained journalists, the credentialed process. It was rarely about whether the work was getting better at the things audiences actually wanted from it. Newspapers defended the institution of reporting while readers drifted toward something the institutions dismissed. Convenience. Voice. Point of view. Authenticity rather than institutional voice.

When YouTube arrived, professional videographers were appalled — bad lighting, shaky cameras, no craft. They were right about the craft and wrong about what mattered. What audiences wanted, it turned out, was not polish but authenticity. The shaky camera and bad lighting screamed authentic. Ultimately, the technology redefined “good video” and the language of good video changed.

How a thing was made has been a thing, but rarely the main thing. People care about what the thing does to them. How it makes them feel. So finally we’re having the serious discussion: What is art for? What do we mean by good? The verification panic is a reaction to the realization the culture’s old definition of excellence is up for grabs.

Clearly we want and need artists, and thus the ferocity of the debate. It’s worth really figuring out why. And that’s certainly a reason that has changed many times in human history. This week there was a fascinating story in The Conversation about research into how listeners in Bach’s time felt music in their innards. And another argument in The New York Times from John McWhorter that “music you can see” is the future because images now mediate everything. Not who made it, not how. Does the art make you feel something? Or not? That’s the question that ultimately matters.

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The “theft” economy is quietly becoming a licensing economy. Two deals last week demonstrate the trend. Getty Images cut a deal to put its licensed images inside ChatGPT, and Google put $75 million into A24 to build AI filmmaking tools. Meanwhile The Atlantic mapped the staggering catalog of music scraped without permission into the AI music generators. The fight over whether training data is theft is real but watch where the money is going: toward making the inputs licensable and the tools native inside the studios. The new AI creative economy infrastructure is being built not by legislation or in the courts, but by corporate America making deals that benefit themselves. Arts leaders should assume the “is it theft” question gets settled by contract, not principle — and plan for which side of that contract they want to be on.

Is the first AI museum art, or a very expensive lava lamp? Refik Anadol’s Dataland opened in LA to mixed reaction — Artnet calls it an “ushering into our new contemporary art world,” while the skeptics ask whether sensory overload is the same as meaning or as art. It’s the definitional fight in miniature: the argument isn’t about who made it but whether it does anything to the people standing inside it. Whatever Dataland turns out to be, it’s being judged on its effect, its value as an experience, and not on how it was made, which is exactly where I think debates over using AI in art is headed.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters.

A growing chorus of critics is asking if we’ve hit a creative dead end in the 21st Century. A new book by W. David Marx, Blank Space, argues that the years from 2000 to 2025 will be remembered as a creative dark age, a time in which culture became a blank. He believes we’ve built a “pluralistic monoculture” that values commercial validation over novelty and virality over invention. Nothing transformative has been made, we endlessly recycle already well-worn themes, and creativity has dried up. Derivative movies, recycled music, retread “franchise” movies, tired visual tropes, and a numbing ocean of meaningless video. So what has happened to art?

Marx has plenty of company. The New York Times Magazine called this the least innovative century since the printing press. The Atlantic asked whether we’re living through the worst era of American pop culture. New York Magazine ran “The Stupid Issue” as it cataloged our current cultural obsessions. Each wonder if we’ve run out of gas.

This is by no means a new complaint. Every aging generation looks at what comes after it and wonders what happened to values and originality. It wasn’t too long ago that tech observers were floating the idea that our ability to innovate had bottomed out in the 90s.

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In her review of Marx’s book in the Yale Review, Audrey Wollen set out to rebut the premise and points to hyperpop and a Los Angeles band called Purity playing covers of covers in backyards and gallery openings as an example of creative innovation. Which it certainly is. But it’s also not visible in traditional channels that used to be essential in order to be found and noticed.

What she’s describing, I think, is 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 strands that are traceable and linear — Baroque counterpoint (Bach) giving way to Classical clarity and balanced form (Haydn, Mozart). Beethoven stress-testing Classical form from the inside until it becomes Romanticism. Late Romanticism (Wagner, Mahler) stretching chromaticism so far that tonality dissolves — there are now multiple cultural universes, each with their own languages and conventions. Each has its own creative masters, famous within that universe. But from the outside, these adjacent universes are all but invisible and their languages opaque. Stumble into some of these and you will be blown away by the skill, dedication and creativity involved.

Production of culture has never been so prolific or inexpensive to make. You can record albums, make films, program games, publish books and build audiences in the millions from your bedroom. All bypassing traditional structures of culture. No gatekeepers. No production houses, no publishers, no capital investors, no critics. The gatekeepers are no longer an essential step on the way to getting to an audience, building a community, or establishing a viable aesthetic or even an art form. But they also don’t register in the traditional culture structures that determined value in the old order.

Meanwhile, those layers that used to stand between making culture and the rest of us — the publishers, studios, producers, critics, radio hosts, magazines, and editors with a point of view, have been weakened. The traditional culture apparatus still exists, though in diminished form. I described this crumbling system for classical music in an interview last week over at Bachtrack, arguing that the civic middleware that made music not just available but findable and meaningful has been collapsing. Because of that, outside of those who grew up with the traditional cultural apparatus and know how to work its levers, in the world of endless and now-viable cultural universes, the traditional culture system has become... largely invisible to new audiences. They simply never encounter it or see a reason to do so.

The media critic Matt Pearce recently described the collapse of our gatekeeper system as a transfer of the difficult cognitive work of sorting that critics and gatekeepers did. The hard work of critical judgement has been offloaded to the audience, an audience that is completely overwhelmed by the flood of culture and the work required to make judgments. So an exhausted audience reaches for shortcuts to make their cultural choices, which makes them vulnerable to algorithms that flatten those choices.

The Walrus last week ran a plea to bring back the gatekeepers — not the culture police of old, but the picky curators who sift through half-formed work and what’s ready for prime time. The New Yorker, pondering a prize-winning story that appears to have been written by a chatbot, traced our slide from poptimism — a measure of quality by how popular something is — to what the writer Katy Waldman coined as sloptimism: if a lot of something exists and people engage with it, how bad can it be?

When you can no longer assess worth outside the metric of mass audience consumption, and wide success now means mere familiarity, then anything new reads as noise. Or as nothing. Note here that by this scale, the intrinsic cultural worth, the essence of a piece of art itself, is not even relevant as a measure of success.

In this kind of universe, streamers scout BookTok for their next adaptations because an algorithm-minted bestseller is a pre-validated title with an audience. And platforms that promised to be new discovery engines have, as El País put it last week, decided your friends are a burden. The platforms just want you to see ads, between the AI-generated filler. No friends necessary. The new middleware optimizes for recognition, not discovery, and is heavily incentivized to show you versions of what you’ve already seen.

So it isn’t that our art has gotten less creative. Or that we no longer have attention spans that can’t tolerate complex art. The crisis isn’t a famine of creativity, it’s a failure of sorting, of navigation. Abundance without curation doesn’t feel like abundance, it feels like static, and static feels like work.

So the challenge isn’t so much to be more creative or to make culture matter again. It already is and already does. This may be the most creative era humanity has ever produced — everyone with a smartphone in their pocket is curating and making culture. The challenge is to build (or rebuild) a middleware that finds, sorts and creates meaning around art, and to decide, deliberately, whether the thing we build serves discovery or just feeds us more of what we already know. Blank space is only blank because connective tissues have atrophied. It is now the essential job of cultural institutions not just to make art and support artists but give them more and better ways to connect to the rest of us.

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The audience is quietly building its own middleware, one object at a time. Teenagers are walking into record stores. Australian record shops report the age of their average customer dropping from fifty to twenty-two. At the same time, a design movement the Guardian calls “anti-slop” is coalescing around conspicuously handmade, janky, and primitive things. This may be a reaction to AI. People are reaching for things whose provenance they can hold, because their digital feeds have become unreadable or generic. Is this a curation problem? When algorithms flatten out your digital diet, perhaps you curate with your hands. It doesn’t seem like a return to the past but a market forming around something that infinite content can’t supply, which is the handmade, the imperfect, the physical. The evidence is mounting.

Pennsylvania and the culture economy trap. Last year the state’s arts council renamed itself “Pennsylvania Creative Industries” and rewrote its rules so that organizations with budgets under $100,000 were no longer eligible. This excluded the smallest, most local, most experimental groups in the name of economic practicality. Last week the council reversed course. So, lessons? When you justify culture by economic value, you eventually optimize for economic value and prune away what doesn’t scale — which is to say, the small and unproven places where the “new” everyone claims to be missing actually germinates.

This week the US Department of Education proposed judging eligibility for college student loan programs by what college graduates of those programs typically earn. The arts programs that would fail under this test read like a list of the country’s crown jewels. Juilliard’s music degrees. Yale’s MFA. Harvard’s museum studies. Programs whose graduates, by the nature of the field they’re in, don’t clear the earnings bar that would keep their students eligible for federal loans.

This idea could wipe out entire fields of study, particularly in the arts. Yale and Juilliard and Harvard can afford to subsidize tuition at whatever level. But for hundreds of other programs at colleges and universities around the country, the squeeze on applications could be terminal at a time the demographic cliff is already killing enrollment.

This is what happens when you insist on using a scale that doesn’t measure the thing you ought to be measuring. In the early 1990s New York and Pennsylvania started publishing cardiac surgeons’ mortality rates, a scorecard of patient deaths per operation. But mortality rate isn’t lives saved, it’s a ratio, and the fastest way to improve a ratio is to refuse the hardest cases. Surgeons began turning away the sickest patients and the metric improved while the thing it was supposed to protect got worse.

As repellant an idea as this new student loan edict seems at first look, the Trump metric isn’t crazy. Loading up a 22-year-old with $100,000 or more of debt for a degree that maybe earns $30,000 a year is a recipe for a life sentence of debt.

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And this idea isn’t entirely a Trump invention. The logic of earnings-as-eligibility has been around for fifteen years. Obama’s “gainful employment” rule, for for-profit colleges and certificate programs that crushed students with disproportionately high debt and low earnings, was finalized in 2014, and first tied federal aid to a debt-to-earnings test. The 2015 College Scorecard made graduate earnings the most prominent factor for judging a degree.

Washington Monthly this spring called the Trump administration’s current proposal “Trump’s one good education reform.” This policy says so much both about how we’ve come to regard education as transactional, and in what we as a society value. There’s a real and obvious problem here that these administrations have felt the need to address: College has become too expensive and we’re crippling graduates with debt that will impact the rest of their lives.

What’s new in this Trump version is only the scope — extending the earnings test from career- and for-profit programs to nearly all education. In the process, it has decided that educational value is only to be measured by economic return.

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. Social value measured on an earnings scale doesn’t just get deprioritized, it doesn’t exist. But we need that social value. So we “subsidize” it, turning it into charity that can’t exist on its own. Then the conservative mindset spins those subsidies as luxuries we can’t afford, so there’s ongoing pressure to eliminate them. What began as a values debate becomes a fiscal debate argued around a measurement scale that doesn’t measure values. If you’re in the arts, this argument should sound very familiar.

This same week, the administration moved to dismantle federal funding for social-science research, the fields that study how a society sees itself. And it also moved to dismantle a network of monitors in the ocean deployed a decade ago to monitor the health of the world’s oceans. Not just deactivate. Dismantle. Why destroy critical state-of-the-art technology? This isn’t hostility to knowledge, it’s engineered blindness, constructed to eliminate values arguments. It’s much more difficult to argue climate change if you aren’t monitoring it at scale. In the absence of social science research, your arguments against ideology weaken. And making it more difficult for students to study the arts means less of that messy DEI social values stuff. Get the policy tweaks right and the whole system of arts, social- and climate-science infrastructure collapses.

Consider what we actually lose in the case of the arts. Not “the arts,” as if these were a luxury good. We lose a place where the skills of public discourse and interaction get practiced. The capacity to consider a perspective that isn’t yours, to disagree with someone without their ceasing to be a person to you, to tolerate ambiguity long enough to think. These are practiced skills, not innate ones, and the arts are one of the places where a society still rehearses them at scale. Theater is a place where strangers get to experience the same thing at the same moment and then argue about what it meant. That’s civic muscle that we need.

A coarse, brutal society isn’t the product of bad people. It’s the product of a culture that hasn’t exercised the muscle of civic engagement to hash out values and priorities and capacity. A culture that doesn’t have the infrastructure to work that muscle devolves into an everyone-for-themself spiral that loses the capacity to invest in the common good.

And here’s what’s so frustrating. The American public broadly believes in education, believes in the value of science, and depends on agencies such as FEMA and the VA and environmental agencies that protect us.

Yet we keep reaching for the wrong arguments. A survey released this week found that 79 percent of Americans believe cities that invest in creative-industry education will do better economically, not worse (an argument for the arts measured with the economic argument). Even so, people intuit that the capacity to make meaning is not a frill, it’s the foundation everything else grows in. But in an education policy system that makes graduate earnings the determinative scale as to what gets supported, these other values and qualities are no longer even part of the debate.

Culture is not a season of shows. It’s not a set of fancy buildings selling tickets. It’s the way a society transmits its character across generations — its arguments, its norms, its ability to experience a shared “we” together long enough to mean something. You can’t measure that in a debt-to-earnings scale. Which is exactly why, if the only thing we can measure is the paycheck, we will keep voting to defund the things that make a country worth the paycheck.

We won’t recover from this by winning the earnings argument. We recover by insisting there are more important ways to measure value.

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Artists are quietly incorporating to protect themselves. Colorado this week became the first state to create the “A Corp,” a flavor of LLC that allows an artist to keep creative control and guarantees that intellectual property reverts to the maker if the company is ever sold. The protection might have kept Taylor Swift’s masters out of Scooter Braun’s hands. The clever part is that none of this is legally new; artists could always build these terms into an ordinary LLC, if they could afford the lawyer. But the bill makes the artist-protective version a cheap, off-the-shelf default. Six more states are drafting their own versions.

AI is flooding the zone. Suno, the leading AI music generator, more than doubled its valuation to $5.4 billion in six months, while AI tracks are now overwhelming streaming playlists faster than AI filters can stop them. Literary editors now admit they can no longer reliably spot AI prose. AI work is flooding the zone, and recent studies say the overwhelming percentage of people can’t spot the synthetic content. And tools that purport to identify AI content are producing more and more false positives. At what point do the distinctions collapse?

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.

A judge has ruled Donald Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center and an impending two-year closure for renovations canceled. So the question is, now what?

A furious Trump threatens to walk away from the whole thing and spits out his contempt. His Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, says over the weekend he’s not sure if or when the name will come off. Whatever happens, in a little more than a year, Trump has managed to run aground one of America’s cultural treasures, and relaunching it, whatever that looks like, will be a long and arduous process.

So a few observations: The place is now being run by the janitor. Actually, it’s unkind to call him that. Matt Floca came up through operations, the facility systems that keep a large building running, and he’s probably pretty good at it. When Ric Grenell, the Trump loyalist who wanted to be Secretary of State but was handed the Kennedy Center instead, departed in March, Floca was who the Trump-appointed board reached for. He’s a metaphor for what Trump and his board think the Center is—a real estate venue, a glamorous roadhouse, not a center of culture or an idea.

If Floca’s not exactly the janitor, he’s also not someone with an artistic vision or experience in translating the Center’s mission into something meaningful.

Then consider the Grenell directive that pushed Washington National Opera out the door in January. Grenell said that productions had to be fully funded before they’re staged. While that might sound like fiscal discipline to an outsider, it’s actually a fantasy, because no opera company on earth finances itself that way. Big productions subsidize small ones, revenue is booked across a run, not before the curtain. Ticket sales, grants, and gifts are taken in on different schedules and never all in advance. The WNO had no choice but to leave because the Kennedy Center started acting like a landlord demanding rent up front from a tenant whose business model the landlord never bothered to understand.

Side by side — a facilities manager in charge and artists required to pre-fund their own risk — the stories are revealing. This is what a performing arts center looks like if you strip away the mission and only the venue remains. Trouble is, Trump didn’t invent this formulation, he actually revealed a weakness in the performing arts center premise itself.

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When the Kennedy Center opened in 1971 as a living memorial, it became the closest thing America has to a national stage. That matters more here than in it does in many other countries, because the United States never built a culture ministry, never funded the arts the way peer countries do, and never decided as a country that culture was important infrastructure. The Kennedy Center, then, was more a symbol or a gesture.

The performing arts center model (the Kennedy Center is a Lincoln Center contemporary), was originally an urban-renewal-era notion. Gather together resident companies under one roof, give them a shared brand, a shared board, a shared capital campaign, and efficiency and prestige would do the rest and the consolidation would produce a center of cultural gravity.

So did it? What exactly is the artistic argument for housing an opera company, a symphony orchestra, a theater program, and a touring Broadway road-house on one campus, beyond a shared loading dock and a joint donor list? The answer ain’t nothing. But it’s also not an unambiguous win either.

A performing arts campus shouldn’t just exist on the geographic logic of a mall. What do these “partners” have to do with one another? Do they share a mission or are they competing for customers? If you’re selling them under a common brand, is that brand distinctive and meaningful or, because it has to answer to many masters, does the brand retreat to the generic? If you’re going to bundle, is the bundle worth more than the sum of its parts?

Trump and his crew see the Kennedy Center as a venue to be booked and a business to be justified in tickets sold, prestige acts and profits. A cultural institution with only a brand and a building, then, is maximally easy to capture.

What actually binds these organizations together? If the answer is proximity and overhead, then the Kennedy Center is a cultural shopping mall with a federal charter — anchor tenants, shared foot traffic, a brand that’ gets a little more generic every year. If something should bind them, it has to be an artistic or civic argument. Can anyone articulate something compelling? That vacuum is precisely why a facilities manager can run the place.

The Kennedy Center is national in its charter and in almost nobody’s actual life. It’s a building most Americans will never enter, in a city most of them visit rarely if at all. In a country that refuses to build cultural infrastructure, the symbol carries enormous weight — but does almost no direct work in the cultural life of the nation it claims to serve.

And maybe that’s enough. One reason to build the Kennedy Center was that before it, culture in the Capital was modest compared to other world cities. In the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union was aggressively training its artists as a showcase for its culture. Though the US made some stabs at promoting American culture abroad, it was popular culture — Hollywood and pop music — that organically got all the attention. The garish red draperies and carpets and stark white marble and oversized common spaces of the complex were built to impress; but they’re no one’s idea of an aesthetic or artistic masterpiece.

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And if its only purpose is to be the Capital’s roadhouse, then okay. But the Kennedy Center has always had aspirations to be that national showcase. Its charter mentions being a “living memorial” to JFK. And in the absence of a national arts policy, that performing arts center is a symbol that matters.

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 essentially have nothing much to do with one another — or worse, having to squabble dysfunctionally among themselves for resources — are an argument for the need for something better. The shared real estate has stunted its resident organizations’ autonomy and identities.

Trump has spent his second term taking a wrecking ball to national institutions, and nearly all the arguments about them are about restoration — how to put the old thing back together when he’s gone. But perhaps this catastrophe is an opportunity to rethink what the Kennedy Center could be. The question is not how do we get the Center back to 2024 but what should this have been all along, and is the wreckage an opportunity to finally build it?

I think it is. At a time when the bottom is falling out of our national arts infrastructure and cultural institutions nationwide are struggling or collapsing, maybe a reborn Kennedy Center could be recreated as an idea with real national impact.

Perhaps the detail worth building on isn’t the lawsuit or the name or the $257 million renovation, but the WNO at George Washington University. The opera company left the building and survived. It will stage its 70th-anniversary season a couple miles away, and the work will go on, because the work was never the real estate. The company is its people, its repertoire, its relationships with audiences and artists. The address was a convenience, not the institution.

Maybe that’s the seed that could animate what comes next. A few ideas:

Decouple the idea from the building. Reconceive the Kennedy Center as a national instrument rather than a national venue — a commissioning engine, a touring and co-production network, a presence that shows up in the many American cities that have no flagship of their own. the center of a network that grows stronger as it builds. National in function, not just on the nameplate. The building on the Potomac becomes one node in that network, not the entire institution and not the hostage.

This is the open source software model, where many contribute to the health of the network, but where the organizer of the network becomes first among equals. There is great power in this role.

Federate the resident companies instead of renting to them. Give the National Symphony, the opera, the theater programs real artistic and financial autonomy, bound by a shared national mission — a common commissioning and touring mandate that gives them an actual reason to be related — rather than by a shared utility bill. The WNO’s move to GWU becomes a template for plural homes, not a defection.

Take the artistic question of mission head on, then build for it. If the gain is a national stage for work that markets won’t fund and regions can’t host, structure the Center to do exactly that and stop pouring subsidy into the parts that are really just a competitive road-house any commercial promoter could run as well or better.

Then the building itself. Does it need a $257 million comprehensive reimagining, or is that the landlord perspective one more time, capital projects being the thing institutions reach for when they can no longer say what they’re for. Separate genuine maintenance from the dream of architectural rebirth. The most radical move available might be to spend far less on the box and far more on the network.

And in the meantime, until Congress reasserts control and until the politics turn, protect the constituent organizations by helping them build work outside the contested building, keep the national commissioning mission alive in a kind of exile, and treat the brand and the box as recoverable later. The idea outlives this administration only if we refuse to let it be held hostage to the address. The WNO has already shown how. The National Symphony is still hostage at the Center, but some negotiated ransom should be found to free it.

There’s great symbolism potential in all this, too. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to national institutions, and many are wondering how we recover. A Kennedy Center reconceived as distributed, resilient, and genuinely national and present in people’s lives rather than perched on a riverbank, is a strong symbol of resistance and rebirth.

Trump says the building may soon close, “probably never to open again.” But maybe the building’s fate isn’t what we should be organizing around.

The real tragedy would be a smaller and more permanently damaged culture icon: a nation’s commitment to culture left so diminished that it could live or die on one tired box on the river. The question, let’s be honest, isn’t really about whether the Kennedy Center survives. It will in some form. The question is can it be something more, something better, something built for what the arts need today.

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I bet you didn’t watch Google I/O last week, and why would you? It’s a tech-industry product announcement. But it’s significant because the company is so integrated into the way the internet works that the event is a de facto guide to where the web is going and how we’ll use it. 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 we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.

Twenty years ago, tech platforms inserted themselves between artist and audience and quietly rewrote the rules of the relationship. Discovery became algorithmic. This shifted cultural value from the culture itself to the traffic or attention that culture generated, flattening the value of “content” so that provocative or incendiary or nostalgic beats anything else. The connective tissue between makers and communities — the critics, the curators, the alt-weeklies, the record stores, the civic institutions that brokered between artists and audiences — got bypassed. The platforms didn’t replace that contextual value, they monetized its absence. And it has undermined and sabotaged traditional culture models ever since.

The middleware that connected artists to the public was extracted, not replaced. Over the past year, that extraction has accelerated sharply. Google’s AI Overviews have eaten the search-referrals that kept the economy of the open web viable. Chartbeat data shows global publisher traffic from Google down by roughly a third. Google traffic to small publishers is down 60 percent. When an Overview appears, the click-through rate on the top-ranked result collapses. About 58 percent of searches now end in zero clicks. The chatbot referrals supposedly replacing them account for less than 1 percent of publisher page views.

Why does this matter to an arts organization? Because the same pipeline is what’s made you visible. It displays your listing, your review, your interview, your season announcement, your ticket processor.

Media observer Matt Pearce wrote a piece at NiemanLab this week that frames the essential shift. Pearce’s essay — You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried — suggests something that arts people will recognize immediately. The platforms drove the cost of producing content to zero, the cost of encountering it to near-zero, and in doing so drove the cognitive cost — the work of figuring out what’s worth your attention — through the roof. The critics and curators and editors the lords of the early internet derided as gatekeepers weren’t blocking access. They were doing cognitive labor on the audience’s behalf. Strip them out and you don’t get a freer, more-informed public. You get one in which every individual is asked to do the filtering and sorting work institutions used to do, at a scale no individual can manage. Pearce calls it a cognitive tax. Harmon Siegel makes the parallel case for visual art in Artforum this month. What the platforms stripped out of culture wasn’t gatekeeping. It was meaning-making.

So this is the context for what Google announced at I/O. Not better search. A replacement for searching. The product names matter less than the function: a 24/7 personal AI agent that lives in the cloud and “takes action on your behalf”; a universal shopping cart that follows you across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Gemini and decides when you should buy; intelligent eyewear shipping this fall to narrate the physical world into your ear. Together they pose a single proposition: We want to insert an agent between you and everything around you.

This is the middleware Google helped dismantle coming back but as a single proprietary intelligence layer owned by the company that profited from demolishing it in the first place. What the new layer mediates is no longer just retrieval, it determines truth, decision, culture, and preference. The agent decides what’s worth paying attention to, what to buy, and what’s true about the world. Discovery on your own terms doesn’t just get harder, it moves inside a black box optimized for values you can’t see and didn’t set.

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Few of us will escape. The part of the web your agent is reading is no longer mostly human. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report — Bots in the Agentic Age — finds automated traffic now accounts for 53% of all web traffic. Human activity is 47% and falling fast. Bots scrape, summarize, rank, and answer for one another and the human reader is incidental.

This month a study reported that AI has passed the Turing Test. Synthetic content is already culturally generative: Florida now has a web of AI-produced “news” sites competing with real journalists; Alberta’s separatist movement is being fueled by AI-generated anthems and videos that look and sound like grassroots culture. The Point observed this month that BookTok sells enormous numbers of books and produces almost no real criticism or context. That is exactly what the platforms engineered: discovery without meaning-making.

For an arts organization trying to be found, this is becoming the new logic. Most of the traffic touching your website isn’t a person. The few people who do find you got there through someone else’s algorithm, and soon, someone else’s agent. The incentives, the exchange of value, and what even counts as being found have all shifted.

But it isn’t only discovery that’s at stake. It’s relationship.

For two centuries our culture worked because audiences had direct, repeated, locally-mediated contact with the people and institutions that made it. You knew your bookstore. You read your critic. You went to your hall. The first two decades of platform algorithms frayed those connections. The next decade, the one Google has now announced, proposes to replace them altogether. The agent meets the institution on your behalf. The agent decides what you should care about. The agent narrates the world into your ear. Your community’s contact with culture becomes contact with a proprietary interface that owns the relationship.

So how should artists think about this? The reflexive argument that “AI is coming for the arts” is unproductive and, in its current form, unwinnable. The argument worth making is a more systemic one (and hence more difficult to act on). The infrastructure Big Tech is building to replace the destructive layer it already inserted between artist and audience is built on values that are corrosive to traditional culture. The AI those companies are using was trained on the collective labor of humanity — writers, musicians, scholars, photographers, and the institutions whose work was taken without consent. Whatever else AI is, it isn’t theirs to own.

But AI isn’t a magic box. It is designed. It is shaped by the values of the companies that make it. If we don’t insist on a different design, one that preserves, or—dream big—enhances the relationship between audiences and the institutions that make culture in their communities, Google and its peers will decide for all of us what culture we can find. And so it becomes the definer what we can trust. Ultimately it decides whether what happens on a stage or in a gallery in your city is something a human being can still locate at all. Already, if your art lives outside what the algorithms optimize for, you’re effectively invisible online.

A few months ago, I wrote about a scenario in which this kind of agentic future could be a powerful new way for artists and arts organizations to cultivate new relationships with their communities. I still believe that. But this month’s Google I/O makes it clear that the window is closing fast for control of who finds what and how online.

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The excellence-vs-inclusion pendulum is swinging back, fast. Arts Council England’s retreat from DEI and reversion to “excellence” is the most visible example but not the only one. Heinz Endowments are dropping grants to individual artists. The Doris Duke Foundation is explicitly funding “resilient models for the future as well as legacy models”. Florida’s legislature is letting the Secretary of State rank arts groups ahead of the state arts council’s own list. These aren’t the same policies, but they all reflect a discomfort with the past decade’s funding philosophies and a search for criteria more fitted to the current political weather. The map of what excellence can be is bigger than this swing in priorities — but the swing is going to define which institutions get funded for the next half-decade.

Spotify’s AI defense tells you where the platforms are headed. Spotify’s CEO arguing that the company’s AI music tools offer users and creators “a better alternative to piracy and unregulated AI slop” is the new platform position. We’ll make the AI ourselves, on our terms, and frame it as protection. YouTube auto-labeling AI video is the strategy from the other direction. The platforms are no longer asking whether they should host synthetic content — they’re competing to be the trusted custodian of it. That changes the terms of every conversation rights-holders and creators are about to have.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.

This week we collected 125 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe]. Here’s what I learned:

Over the past six months we’ve collected dozens of stories about the death of Hollywood. The cumulative numbers are stark: roughly half of all Hollywood production jobs are gone, and the family businesses that built the production economy — prop houses, florists, craft services — are closing in droves. This week Hollywood’s production crisis became a defining issue in the LA mayor’s race, and the desperately consolidating studios are seeing their structures crack: Paramount’s credit rating slid further toward junk rating on the Warner Bros. deal that will cut still more jobs and productions. Studios skipped Cannes, and Warner Music cut a deal to mine its catalog for biopics — IP extraction, not creation, which is the behavior of an industry model running out of risk tolerance and cash.

But that’s the obvious half of the story, the Hollywood production model collapsing. The more interesting story is what may be happening beside and underneath.

Because perhaps we can see the first shoots of the next model of Hollywood being assembled. A working talent manager wrote last week that the action is migrating: under-$5 million features, international co-productions, management firms restructuring around brand-funded development.

The hot hot production company A24, now thirteen years old, runs its own New York theatre and a hip restaurant alongside a steady run of movie hits. A coordinated group of creatives is making 50 films in 2026 entirely outside the studio system — the NonDē (”non-dependent”) movement. And film-maker Ryan Coogler reportedly negotiated three terms on Sinners that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: final cut, first-dollar gross, and rights reversion in 2050. In twenty-five years the film is his.

Here’s the thing: Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century — the studio system replaced the nickelodeon, the first indoor storefront exhibition space dedicated entirely to showing projected motion pictures; the Paramount Decrees broke up studio theatre ownership; the backlot machine model gave way to the deal-and-finance model in the 90s; followed by the studios-as-streaming model; and now a new model being invented as we watch. Each reinvention was painful and cost careers. Each produced a successor before the old model was fully dead. The point is: the industry, a very lucrative one, has been forced to repeatedly evolve its business and artistic models in order to survive, yes, but also to try to stay artistically relevant.

The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once.

In 1965, the Ford Foundation and the NEA built the institutional architecture it is still running on. The 501(c)(3) regional theatre, the orchestra subscription season, the museum endowment, the university MFA pipeline — all of it is essentially the same structure that was in place when the Beatles were still touring.

The world is a vastly different place than it was in the 1960s. Business models have evolved and evolved. Audience behavior has radically changed. Philanthropy has transformed its priorities and expectations. And institutions of all stripes across our culture have sustained attacks and been forced to reinvent. The internet. Even our politics have... well, become whatever they’ve become. The point is that in almost every arena of endeavor, it’s inconceivable that the participants haven’t moved with the times.

Except for the non-profit arts model.

Though ailing for years, the model is now in full out collapse. The reasons are many and every week’s stories bring fresh evidence. But what to do? If we take the movie industry example, in a contraction, leverage moves to whoever can credibly walk away. Demand for movies has never been higher — people aren’t watching less. So interestingly, the power is shifting—it may be that the studios will need creators more than the creators need them, and so the terms of trade are being rewritten in real time.

So what about nonprofit arts?

I wonder if the failure to evolve is baked into the model’s founding premise: that these art forms can’t survive the commercial market and so must be subsidized. Survival is framed as dependency, as charity, and to question the premise is to threaten the foundation of goodwill the subsidy depends on.

Most of our biggest arts foundations have exited funding the arts. Not because they don’t believe in art. But because they have lost belief in the ability of arts organizations to evolve. Last year I met with the arts program manager at a major foundation who told me they had “given up” on opera companies and symphony orchestras. “They just don’t get it. They won’t change.” Then he pointed to some scrappy small startups that were innovating as examples of what interested him.

The problem with his examples, as scrappy and innovative as they were, was that they were adapting to the disfunction of a model that no longer works. They could be nimble and resourceful through extraordinary effort and survive. But their extraordinariness, as excellent as it was, didn’t allow them to thrive, as it would in a functioning landscape — just survive. And when they get exhausted, as so many before them have, they will go away. This is a systemic sector problem, not something that any one enterprise can solve. Should you have to be extraordinary just to survive?

Yet the “can’t survive the market” actually describes most of the American economy. The Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act put $39 billion in direct grants into semiconductor manufacturing. Fossil fuels collect roughly $35 billion a year in direct federal subsidies. The employer health-insurance tax exclusion runs about $300 billion a year, the single largest tax expenditure in the entire code. Defense contractors live on cost-plus contracts and keep the government-funded R&D as private IP. NFL team owners get tens of billions of dollars in assorted public subsidy.

We make these subsidy investments because they produce goods or services we need or want. Fair enough. But I’d argue that what we haven’t invested in is the civic health of our country, what I’ve come to call the middleware that connects us and helps develop the values and leadership America has so long prided itself on. We’ve let it develop haphazardly and allowed it to be kidnapped by platforms and self-interests. As those middleware structures have dissolved over time, our leadership and our common purpose has eroded. When we do make social investments, it’s to address emergencies, like healthcare and food and homelessness. But what about investments in civic culture? Not so much, and when we do, we classify it as charity rather than investment in a healthy nation.

None of America’s big corporations call themselves charities. Many pride themselves on being free-market cowboys. There are worthy subsidies on that list, funding things we genuinely need. But characterizing art culture as a subsidy case while waving the oil industry through as free-market cowboys is, frankly, obscene. Until we adjust the frame of the argument for the arts in this country, I worry that we are trapped in a systemic non-profit decline.

So here’s more of what this week added to this picture. While institutions hold the 1965 line, a scramble for survival is happening underneath them — not by design, but by improvisation. UK music venues have started letting touring bands sleep in the building because touring economics no longer pencil out. A Finnish museum is paying four artists a stipend and covering their health insurance. Artists are openly bartering work for haircuts, meals, and lodging. New Zealand is pushing most of its arts-funding decisions down to as many as 16 regional bodies. Ireland has been experimenting with a guaranteed artist income scheme. And fascinatingly, Colorado’s state senate has just approved a new business entity category for artists — the A-Corp, intended to give artists a new model. Perhaps this is a non-profit version of the NonDē movement, the replacement architecture forming amidst the collapsing buildings, in pre-market forms: patronage, barter, mutual aid, devolved decision-making.

But we should note a difference from Hollywood’s reinvention process, because it’s important. Hollywood’s reinvention comes with leverage and negotiated terms — Coogler walks into the room and rewrites the deal. The arts’ version is subsistence improvisation, and nobody is at the table negotiating anything. The bands get a couch, not first-dollar gross. The muscle Hollywood is flexing, the one that looks at a contraction and asks what’s the replacement architecture, who’s building it, and how do we move resources toward it before the old one falls in on us, the nonprofit arts establishment never really built. So the reinvention is happening to the field, not by it.

And those who have spotted this shift are taking advantage of it. Changes in the models, particularly regarding how AI will change things, aren’t primarily being set in legislatures and in courtrooms. The new policies are coming from the giant companies making deals amongst themselves — Universal Music and Spotify and Disney with OpenAI and Anthropic. With these licensing deals, they lock in favorable terms for themselves, which then entire creative industries have to fall in line with.

I suspect the institutions that survive will be the ones that recognize the bottom-up improvisation for what it is — the first rough outline of a successor — and start negotiating its terms while they still have leverage. The ones that don’t will learn what the LA prop houses are learning: that you can be essential to the old system and irrelevant to the new one at the same time.

I write this not to complain about a structure that no one wants to change. I believe most working in the non-profit system are more than aware of its inadequacies. There is, in fact, hunger for a better model. But it’s also a monumental challenge to reset the frame and make the case for the arts as essential civic infrastructure —like the oil industry and chips and national defense and health insurance—and wean us off the notion that the arts are a charity or a frill or an afterthought, an argument we can’t win.

The arts have become philanthropic patronage again, with the majority of income coming from donations. This is what they were before the non-profit model was created in the 1960s to create a systemic structure of support. We recognized the need for that new system back then. We need to do that again. Now.

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Is an opera company doing what NonDē is doing in film? Washington National Opera unveiled a five-stage, post–Kennedy Center season, distributing itself across the city rather than orbiting a single damaged anchor. It looks like the same move, the same playbook: parallel-system mode, forced by circumstance. When the old anchor breaks, the network is probably the answer.

Brand capital is arriving in the arts whether we approve or not. Dance Magazine documents how Cartier, Chanel, and LVMH have moved from sponsoring galas to underwriting actual choreography — the Sugar23 brand-funded model crossing into the nonprofit world. The creative-integrity questions are legitimate; so is the patronage gap left by contracting public and foundation money. The useful version of the conversation isn’t “is brand money good or bad.” It’s what the terms of trade are, and who is negotiating them on behalf of the field. Coogler negotiated three. So far, dance appears to be negotiating none.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories we collected for ArtsJournal from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters for all the culture news of the week.

This week we collected 126 stories on ArtsJournal. Here's what I learned:

The Venice Biennale, one of the visual arts world’s most important events, opened Saturday in complete disarray. The EU pulled its funding. Earlier in the week the jury resigned over which countries should be eligible. The Golden Lion — the coveted grand prize — was scrapped for a people’s choice vote. The US pavilion sits nearly empty after the Trump administration declared it wanted work that “reflect and promote American values” (talk about your metaphors). Iran withdrew. Anish Kapoor said the US should be banned outright. Pussy Riot stormed the Russian pavilion in pink balaclavas. Artists went on strike. This is what happens when an institution of cultural authority can no longer agree on its own basic terms — who gets in, who decides, and what its prize actually means.

It’s a disaster. But only the latest and most visible version of an erosion of authority and relevance that’s been creeping up on the biggest culture prizes over the past several years.

The Turner Prize, which once defined contemporary British art and made the YBAs household names earlier this century, has been steadily losing cultural relevance over the past decade. The Booker Prize still declares winners but operates inside a narrow literary register that excludes most of what people actually read. The Oscars now routinely award films almost no large audience saw, and the cultural conversation about movies has migrated to YouTube and TikTok. Movie star culture is fading and becoming more niche. The Grammys can crown winners whose music vast portions of the music-listening public have never heard, because contemporary music has fragmented into hundreds of genres and sub-communities, each with its own internal stars. The Emmys have become a footnote against the actual scale of what people watch. Book prizes never go anywhere near romance, the largest commercial fiction category in the country.

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

• Mr. Beat was a high school history teacher who became a YouTube creator and has been making long videos about American history and civics for more than a decade. He has well over a million subscribers and a real media career. To history teachers and the civics-curious he’s a star. To a wider culture audience he’s essentially invisible. There’s no Pulitzer for what he does. He didn’t go to a prestigious school. Yet his cultural footprint is larger than most regional arts organizations in this country.

Or perhaps you thought I meant Mr. Beast.

• Mr. Beast has almost half a billion YouTube subscribers, the largest individual channel on the largest video platform in the world, with videos watched by hundreds of millions of viewers. Most ArtsJournal readers have heard of him, but I bet few have watched. He isn’t a category we tend to think of as cultural and yet by audience scale he is the largest entertainer on the planet.

• Or Colleen Hoover. Her novels have outsold the entire Booker shortlist combined for several years running, driven by a BookTok community that interacts with her work the way other communities once interacted with literary fiction. She has never been near a literary prize, and the literary prize circuit will never tell anyone she exists.

You can run this exercise across almost any cultural category now. This isn’t about taste, or excellence, and it isn’t about credentialism. I tried to make a distinction between them a few weeks ago. The prize question is an intriguing example, I think, of how our culture is transforming.

What did prizes used to do? They sorted. They told outsiders — funders, casual audiences, students, a “general” audience — what was worth paying attention to in a noisy ecosystem. Prizes helped build careers, aligned funders and resources with critical consensus, and gave the not-yet-expert a usable shorthand. The Pulitzer told you whose journalism mattered. The Turner told you which young British artists were worth tracking. The Oscar told you which film was the conversation that year. They worked because the environment they were sorting was small enough that elite consensus could plausibly stand in for general cultural attention. The Venice Biennale was an Olympiad of visual art — not a “best” anyone could agree on, but a snapshot of what was in the visual conversation the artworld was having.

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That environment doesn’t exist anymore. A look at the economic scale of institutional culture compared to the size of audience for culture suggests a mismatch between economic value and audience size. By dollars, non-profit culture ($73 billion) is dwarfed by the commercial kind — Disney’s annual revenue alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution combined. By audience size, non-profit and commercial cultural attendance are comparable, with non-profit museum visits outnumbering movie box office.

But there’s also an enormous fragmented culture middle too: hundreds of thousands of cultural communities — YouTube history audiences, BookTok romance networks, the global K-pop fan economy, gaming-soundtrack listeners, fanfic ecosystems — most of them larger than the institutions our prizes serve yet none of them visible to those prizes.

Prizes used to be a kind of shorthand way of identifying a version of “quality” that guided what you should pay attention to. What used to do that sorting work is now done by algorithms, communities, and platform recommendation systems. But here’s the crucial difference. Prizes sorted based on the qualities of the art itself. The new sort doesn’t even think about quality; it sorts for attention. None of these mechanisms sort for what prizes sort for. They sort for engagement, retention, and tribal reinforcement.

A prize is a deliberate act of judgment by a small group with stated criteria. An algorithm is the aggregated friction of billions of micro-choices. The shift from one to the other isn’t just a change in mechanism. It’s a change in how what’s “important” is determined.

The real question isn’t whether prizes survive. Most will, in some form, as internal-community signaling that means a lot inside the field and very little outside it — think Pritzker Prize. A bigger question though, is: how do we sort cultural relevance now? What replaces prizes as a way a curious outsider finds out whose work is worth their attention?

Still bigger question: if cultural institutions — of course self-interested and self-promoting as ever — have diminished cultural authority in the broader culture, and critics and prizes have diminished in influence as slightly more independent declarers of “quality” or standards, and if even notions of quality have transferred from evaluating the work itself to toting up the algorithmically-optimized attention and engagement that “content” generates, what’s the role of an arts institution or a creative field in a sorting environment built around algorithms, communities, and platforms they don’t operate?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Institutions will have to find answers in the next decade to developing relationships with the sorting mechanisms actually reaching contemporary audiences. And they’ll have to learn the new vocabulary needed to make a case for cultural relevance.

AI is already transforming how we find and interact with culture. It will make today’s discovery tools look crude. I think that there is enormous opportunity in this, because AI could connect us with culture in ways not just based on crude numbers and algorithms we use now. But there’s also the very real possibility that AI might narrow our tastes even more.

There’s a way of thinking about this week’s Venice Biennale blowup as exactly the kind of controversy and conflict that feed today’s algorithms. And sure, attendance might get a boost because of it. (The Biennale reports 10,000 visitors on its first day, about 10 percent up from last year) But the broader significance is of an old cultural institution suffering an identity crisis caused by threats to its relevance. Most of the older sorting machines are losing relevance more quietly and it’s those that should worry us more.

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The founder generation is leaving the building. Leon Botstein retired this week from Bard College, a place he transformed and made hugely relevant over 51 years, leaving in the shadow of Epstein-related revelations he ought to have confronted before now. Ted Turner died at 87, a transformative and flamboyant figure who transformed news in the America. ArtsHub published a piece asking how long an arts leader should stay, and in the Australian context the answer turned out to be: until forced. The American answer hasn’t been very different. A specific cohort of charismatic individual builders — the Bards, the CNNs, the regional opera companies whose identity is inseparable from one person — is exiting the field, and the institutions they made don’t necessarily have succession architectures designed for their departures.

Public broadcasting is being squeezed everywhere at once. France’s parliamentary report proposes sweeping cuts to its public broadcaster. The BBC’s newsroom is taking the deepest cuts in a 2,000-job downsizing. Three Massachusetts public radio outlets are merging into one. Hungary is still digging out from Orbán’s media destruction. Programmatic advertising is creeping further into US public radio. Set against a $2.9 billion Warner Bros. loss and James Murdoch’s advanced talks to buy New York magazine, what we’re watching is a specific category of civic infrastructure being financially squeezed simultaneously across multiple democracies. Arts organizations have historically depended on public broadcasters as distribution partners. That channel is narrowing in five countries at once.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.

A few months ago I attended a virtual convening of non-profit arts leaders from across America gathering to discuss the arts model and how it might be strengthened. I wondered why we were just talking among the non-profit arts sector, when it seems to me the commercial creative industry, though bigger, is facing many of the same issues. And that led me to wondering about the comparative size of the non-profit and for-profit culture industries.

If we’re going to think about how to fix a culture model that’s not working well, we should try to understand the scale of what we’re actually talking about. So over the past few months I’ve been compiling sources to attempt to find out, and it turns out that it’s a project that requires not just hunting reliable numbers, but making a series of philosophical choices as to what and how you count. Last week I wrote about comparing the economic size of both sectors.

But that’s only part of the story. Dollar value is certainly one way of measuring (and what people choose to spend their money on is a good indicator of interest). But we should also consider audience size. And ideally, we’d like to measure the impact or engagement people have with the culture they choose. I’m not sure how to defensibly measure that last part, but we can take a stab at measuring audience, though it turns out doing that requires even more calibration in what and what not to include.

So I propose the following not as the definitive accounting, but my best attempt to understand the relative scale of the culture industries. I think the numbers suggest a different way of thinking about making a case for the traditionally non-profit arts sector.

By revenue, the non-profit 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 alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution in the country combined.

But the map of audience shows something entirely different.

Americans visit museums roughly 850 million times a year, according to the AAM. They buy 800 million movie tickets, according to box office numbers. The aggregate scale of nonprofit and commercial cultural attendance turns out to be within shouting distance of one another — same order of magnitude, similar scale of participation.

Same audience, but vastly different economics.

The headline numbers, side by side: Total US non-profit live cultural attendance by my accounting (sources and methodology at the end) comes in around 965 million a year — museums (~850M), nonprofit theatre (27M), performing arts centers and presenting venues (~25M), orchestras (22M), nonprofit festivals like Tanglewood and Aspen (~20M), choral concerts (~10M), university presenters like Cal Performances and UMS (~8M), opera (2M). Total US commercial live cultural attendance comes in around 1.37 billion — movies (800M), theme parks (158M), the Big Four sports leagues combined (134M), college and minor-league sports (125M), Live Nation US concerts (60M), Broadway and national touring (29M), Las Vegas residencies and shows (~25M), comedy clubs and dinner theatre (20M), commercial music festivals (12M), the WNBA and NWSL combined (4.4M).

Roughly the same order of magnitude. The non-profit number comes in at about 70 percent of the commercial. Compare that to the revenue numbers — for-profit industry revenue is 16 times larger than the non-profits.

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The composition is wildly different. Museums dominate the nonprofit number. Movies dominate the commercial. Live performing arts and presenting venues are small in either column but significant in both. By participation, the non-profit cultural sector is a near-peer of the entire commercial culture economy. So the dollar gap between the two isn’t a popularity gap, it’s a pricing gap.

This comparison is built on live, in-person, ticketed or admission-tracked cultural attendance. It excludes digital cultural engagement — streaming video, broadcast television, video games, podcasts, music streaming, social media. Americans average roughly five hours a day on video streaming alone, and adding screen time would push every commercial figure into the trillions of hours and reshape the comparison around something other than physical participation. That’s a different post for another time. Where category aggregates are published by a trade body or league, I’m using the trade body’s number; where none exists, I’m using documented bottom-up estimates with ranges. Methodology, source links, and cautions for the numbers are at the end of this post.

So what can we learn from this? The notion that non-profit culture is much smaller than for-profit because fewer people participate is flat wrong. In popularity, it turns out that pop culture industries aren’t that much more popular. In fact, museums are much more popular than many kinds of “pop” culture. When you look across the vast array of different cultures that Americans consume, it looks like a mosaic, admittedly anchored by museums and movies, but otherwise distributed across a wide range of interests. “Pop” culture, as we thought of it in the 20th Century in the TV era, as a monolith of popular choice, no longer dominates the national psyche. We have fragmented our attention, for good and bad, and we have many kinds of fame now, not just the pop culture celebrity version.

What sticks out in the comparison is the disparity in culture monetization. Per-attendee economics, in round numbers, are instructive. Disney’s domestic parks pull about $190 from each guest in admissions and in-park spending. An NFL game with concessions runs $150 or more. A movie ticket: roughly $11. A nonprofit theatre seat: $25 to $50. A museum visit: $0 to $25, average closer to $10 once you weight free admission and discounted hours.

So a single Disney park visit is monetized roughly twenty times as aggressively as a museum visit. An NFL game extracts about fifteen times what a museum visit does. Disney’s global parks-and-experiences division produced $34 billion in revenue last year off 140 million park visits and the surrounding Disney machine of hotels, cruises, and merchandise the parks anchor. Disney’s most-popular park, in Florida, attracted $17.8 million visitors. The Smithsonian drew 17 million visits and generated effectively zero visitor revenue. Both organizations are doing precisely what they were designed to do.

The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale. This isn’t a moral judgment: extraction at scale is what for-profit models are built to do and they do it well. But it means the non-profit sector’s economic “smallness” is structural on purpose, not evidence of marginal cultural standing. The free museum, the priced-for-access regional theatre, the subsidized concert ticket — these aren’t bugs in the design, they are the design.

But here’s where I think the story gets dark. The frame for non-profits is rigged by the language. We call commercial culture “free-market capitalism” and non-profit culture “subsidized.” Both descriptions are wrong. Public dollars flow into the commercial cultural economy at massive volume. NFL and MLB stadiums have absorbed roughly $33 billion in taxpayer subsidy over the past three decades. Film and TV production tax credits cost US states about $25 billion a year. Stan Kroenke’s new $5 billion Rams stadium in Los Angeles got a reported $400 million in public subsidy. Georgia’s film tax credit alone puts $1.3 billion a year on the public ledger (shout out to “Walking Dead” fans).

These dollars don’t pay for the games or the movies. They reduce the capital and operating costs of for-profit enterprises whose profits flow to private owners — Kroenke, Disney shareholders, studio shareholders. The subsidy capitalizes the owners, with the public return the privilege of being allowed to buy a ticket on the owner’s terms.

Public dollars flow into the non-profit cultural sector in a fundamentally different way. NEA grants expand accessibility. State arts council appropriations subsidize ticket prices, fund commissions, support touring, and build infrastructure that’s permanently held in public trust. The Met Museum cannot be sold to a hedge fund (at least officially). The Smithsonian cannot be taken private. The mission is the property.

The same word, “subsidy,” is doing two different jobs. One capitalizes private wealth and routes the cultural output through paywalls. The other produces public goods that are legally bound to public purposes. Treating them as morally equivalent — or worse, pretending one is free-market, earning its way, while the other is government largess or charity — is just wrong. And yet that is the frame that the non-profit arts industry so often accepts in its funding arguments.

Here’s a thought experiment: what if the subsidies were reversed and government subsidized benefits to the cultural products that generated the most returns to the most people instead of a tiny number of billionaire NFL owners and oil company execs and Disney? A non-profit culture subsidy comparable to that for stadiums annually would quintuple the size of the NEA budget.

To be fair, we have to acknowledge that non-profits are subsidized by not paying taxes that commercial entities do. But resetting the language makes it clearer how the business frames work. There are examples of this subsidy distortion across the American economy. Oil companies earn billions of dollars a year in profits. But the industry is also heavily subsidized. As is agriculture.

So what?

• For arts policy and advocacy, the relevant unit of measurement isn’t dollars, it’s participation. Federal NEA appropriations plus all state arts agencies total about $965 million a year in service of a sector that delivers nearly a billion live cultural attendances. About a dollar of public investment per cultural participation. Compare that to the per-attendance public subsidy on a $400 million stadium hosting ten home games for 70,000 fans each. The math isn’t close.

• For non-profit cultural leaders, the move should be to stop fighting on the metric the model was specifically designed not to optimize for. The “we contribute $X to the economy” argument was never one the structure was built to win. The argument that’s actually defensible and accurate is that the non-profit sector delivers hundreds of millions of cultural participations a year at low cost per person served, in a form that cannot be replicated commercially without changing what it is. Argue infrastructure, not industry.

• The for-profit cultural sector is not the adversary. It faces the same structural pressures bearing down on the non-profit world, just at vastly larger scale. Audience attention is fragmenting. AI is flooding the content market. Platform intermediaries are extracting margin. Younger audiences are reconsidering what they’ll pay for live experience. The Met Opera and Live Nation are wrestling with the same demographic puzzle. Disney is fighting the same fragmentation problem regional theatres are. The shared question is what culture is for, who pays for it, and how the people who actually make it get paid.

• The adoption of AI will change much everything about how the culture industry — non-profit and commercial — will work. It will scramble how value is assigned, who the audience is, how artists get paid, who has jobs, and how culture is delivered. Big Tech is throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into this makeover project with the expectation of extracting trillions of dollars. The thing is, those AI models are built on the knowledge and creativity and industry we humans have produced. We shouldn’t give that away for free; it would be the mother-of-all-subsidies if we did. But maybe if we reframe the way we understand how the culture economy works we will have a stronger claim in benefitting from the value extracted.

Free markets are policy. Cultural policy is policy. We’ve already decided that some forms of cultural infrastructure are worth public investment, at substantial scale. The question is whether the choices we’ve made reflect what we actually want our cultural infrastructure to be. The answer at the moment is probably not. By participation, the non-profit cultural sector is one of the largest broad-access cultural enterprises in the country. But the funding model treats it as a niche concern. That we should definitely change.

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Methodology and sources

Building a credible head-to-head comparison of non-profit and commercial cultural participation in the US is difficult and messy. The two halves of the cultural economy report through different bodies, on different fiscal calendars, using different definitions. Some categories have rigorous trade-body aggregates while others have no national reporter at all. So herewith, some caveats about the count and some rationales.

What the numbers count

Live, in-person, ticketed or admission-tracked cultural attendance in the United States. This includes free admission where it’s tracked (most museums, most outdoor public concerts) and excludes physical activity that isn’t really cultural participation (mass transit, retail, religious services, National Park visits...).

What the numbers don’t count

Digital cultural engagement — streaming video, broadcast television, video games, podcasts, music streaming, social media. Adding any of these would push the commercial side into the trillions of engagement-hours and recast the comparison as a contest about screen time rather than physical participation. The case for live cultural infrastructure is fundamentally a case about civic gathering, and that’s the comparison this post measures. The digital-engagement question deserves its own treatment.

How I got the totals

Where a trade body or league publishes a national aggregate, I’m using the trade body’s most recent figure. Where no aggregate exists, I’m using midpoint estimates from bottom-up counts of documented major venues plus reasonable ranges for the long tail. Below I explain estimates.

By category

Firm — published trade body or league figures:

• Museum visits — 850M (American Alliance of Museums; figure predates pandemic and current is ~700–800M; long-cited as the canonical aggregate)

• Movie theater tickets — 800M (Motion Picture Association)

• Theme park visits — 158M (TEA Theme Index 2024, top 24 US parks)

• Big Four sports combined — 134M (MLB 71M, NFL 18M, NBA 22.5M, NHL 22.5M; league reports)

• College + minor league sports — 125M (NCAA football ~50M, NCAA basketball ~30M, MiLB 31M, MLS 12M, plus other minors)

• Live Nation US concerts — 60M (Live Nation 2024 10-K, Venue Nation US attendance only)

• Broadway + national touring — 29M (Broadway League, 2023–24 season)

• Nonprofit theatre — 27M (TCG Theatre Facts 2023)

• Orchestras — 22M (League of American Orchestras Impact Report 2023–24)

• Commercial music festivals — 12M (festival-level reporting summed)

• WNBA — 2.35M (record 2024 season; WNBA / ESPN)

• NWSL — 2.0M+ (record 2024 season; NWSL league reports)

• Opera — 2.1M (OPERA America 2022–23 Annual Field Report)

Estimated — midpoint range:

• Performing arts centers — ~25M (range 20–30M); bottom-up from documented major venues (Lincoln Center ~5M, Kennedy Center ~3M, Hollywood Bowl ~750K, Wolf Trap ~355K, plus 30–40 large regional PACs). No national aggregator publishes a sector total.

• Las Vegas entertainment — ~25M (LVCVA reports 41.7M total visitors with ~37% attending shows × ~1.5 shows each ≈ 23M; rounded to 25M for ticketed entertainment)

• Comedy clubs + dinner theatre — 20M (NEA SPPA shows 7–8% adult attendance × frequency)

• Nonprofit festivals — ~20M (range 15–25M); bottom-up from documented festivals (Tanglewood 350K, Ravinia 600K, Aspen 100K, Hollywood Bowl 750K, Grant Park ~227K, plus regional Shakespeare and music festivals)

• Choral concerts — ~10M (range 6–15M); bottom-up estimate from ~12,000 US choruses × 3 concerts/year × ~250 average audience. Chorus America reports 42M Americans participate in choruses as singers, but does not publish an aggregate audience figure. The 10M estimate captures concert audiences only, which is a different (smaller) population than the 42M who sing.

• University presenters — ~8M (range 5–10M); bottom-up from major university venues (UMS Michigan 150K, Cal Performances 250K, plus 100–150 mid-sized university presenters)

What I left out

These categories would push the nonprofit number higher if reliably aggregated: community theatre (the American Association of Community Theatre lists 7,000+ member theatres but does not publish an aggregate attendance figure; bottom-up estimates range from 7–15M), public library cultural programming, K-12 school arts attendance, National Parks Service historic and cultural site visitation (~40–60M annually), and free outdoor festival attendance not captured under the festival line. Including them is consistent with the framing of nonprofit cultural participation but unreliable.

These categories would push the commercial number higher: NCAA hockey and lacrosse, professional rodeo, dinner shows in non-Vegas markets, and a long tail of independent venue concerts. The Live Nation figure is one promoter’s US venue attendance; total US concert attendance across all promoters is meaningfully larger.

Caveats on specific figures

The museum 850M figure is AAM’s standard citation, originally from the early-2000s era of museum data collection. AAM’s 2024 surveys show roughly half of US museums have not yet returned to pre-pandemic attendance, so current attendance is probably closer to 700–800M. Using 850M is consistent with the figure museums and policymakers cite; using 750M is consistent with current AAM survey data. The story holds either way.

Performing arts numbers (theatre, orchestras, opera) reflect 2023 fiscal year data and are still recovering from the pandemic. 2024–25 figures will likely be modestly higher across all three categories.

The Disney $190 per-capita extraction figure is FY2024 domestic-park per-capita guest spending (admissions plus in-park food/beverage and merchandise) as reported in Disney’s 10-K. International parks per-capita is somewhat lower; globally weighted is approximately $170.

Sources

Nonprofit cultural attendance

• American Alliance of Museums — Museum Facts & Data

• Theatre Communications Group — Theatre Facts 2023

• League of American Orchestras — Impact Report 2023–24

• OPERA America — 2024 Annual Field Report

• Chorus America — Audience research and participant statistics (42M choral participants)

• Americans for the Arts — Arts & Economic Prosperity 6

• NEA — Survey of Public Participation in the Arts 2022

• Performing arts centers: bottom-up from venue annual reports

• University presenters: APAP membership data, individual venue reports

• Festivals: individual festival annual reports (Tanglewood / BSO, Ravinia, Aspen Music Festival, Grant Park Music Festival, etc.)

Commercial cultural attendance

• Motion Picture Association — Theme Report

• TEA / AECOM Global Experience Index 2024

• League reports: MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, MiLB, NCAA

• WNBA — 2024 record-setting season (2.35M total attendance)

• NWSL — 2024 attendance report (2.0M+ total attendance)

• Live Nation 2024 10-K (SEC filing)

• Broadway League — Season Statistics

• Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority — Visitor Profile

• Festival-level reporting (Coachella ~750K, Lollapalooza ~460K, Austin City Limits ~450K, EDC Las Vegas ~525K, Stagecoach ~75K, Outside Lands ~225K, Bonnaroo ~80K)

Per-attendee revenue figures (Section 3)

• Disney FY2024 10-K — Parks per-capita guest spending

• NFL and MLB attendance economics from industry reporting

• MPA average ticket price (movie tickets)

• Broadway League average paid admission

• AAM museum admission economics

Subsidy figures (Section 4)

• Tax Foundation — State Film Tax Credits (~$25B aggregate annual cost across US states)

• Academic research on stadium subsidies — see J.C. Bradbury et al., Journal of Economic Surveys (2023), aggregating ~$33B in public stadium subsidies over the past three decades

• NASAA — FY2024 State Arts Agency Revenues Report ($755M FY2024)

• NEA — FY2025 Budget ($210M)

Reference data from Part 1

• BEA Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, 2023 ($1.17T US arts and cultural GDP, 5.4M jobs)

• Americans for the Arts — Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 ($73.3B nonprofit organizational spending, 2.6M jobs)

I realize there is a whole lot of judgment involved in creating this picture. My goal isn’t to definitively measure, but to try to build a case for the scale comparison. If you want to contest any of these choices or numbers, please write and make the case.

This week we collected 138 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe]. Here’s what I learned:

Cultural historian Joseph Horowitz published an alarm this week — part of a transcript of a conversation he had with conductor Thomas Fortner about whether classical music can survive a collective collapse of attention. He writes:

“The idea of listening to bits and pieces, sampling a performance, sampling a symphony, is almost irresistible right now. . . . There is no way to listen to Mahler’s 3rd Symphony except to swallow the whole thing. You’ve got to take it all or forget it. It’s not like Mahler 5 where you can enjoy the Adagietto. Mahler 3, you either take it all, or don’t listen to it at all. . . .“

He contends that our attention spans have collapsed, and with it, our ability to access cultural tradition and meaning. But what he’s describing isn’t a classical-music problem. It’s a culture-wide issue, and something familiar to anyone who has had active engagement with the arts over time.

One way of understanding cultural memory, perhaps, is that it used to be constructed vertically. You learned a tradition by going deeper — context built on context and understood through what came before, criticism teaching you how to read what you were looking at. The institutions we built to steward those traditions also nurtured those that created connective tissue: curators, programmers, conductors, critics, conservatories, archives, programs, liner notes. The works without the connective tissue were just notes until they were connected with meaning.

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So what’s become of this connective tissue?

LACMA opened its billion-dollar Zumthor building last month, and Carolina Miranda’s Bloomberg review is candid, calling it architectural drama at the expense of art. Not “instead of art” but at the expense of it. The museum purposefully did away with the connective tissue inside that once told visitors why these objects mattered to each other and substituted aesthetic ambience.

This week, the Atlantic published a piece describing how short-form video is now the atomic unit of online content. The vertical Chinese micro-drama has exploded across the globe. These are teeny tiny scenes, often no more than a few seconds long, that tell micro-stories stripped of longer narrative. You watch, supplying your own context. They’re addictive. Somehow they resonate. And they’re almost completely free of nutrition. AI now makes anyone an influencer. And to institutionalize this shift, the world’s first museum of AI-generated art opens in June inside Frank Gehry’s Grand LA. The form is the work stripped of the frame, multiplied toward infinity.

Then there’s this: an AI model determined that a random street artist’s painting is more valuable than a Picasso. So understand: an algorithm reads the entire history of art and decides Picasso is meh and that some rando artist on the street is more significant. It’s easy to dismiss the story, but what’s really happening is that you’re looking at memory that has been disassembled and reassembled without any awareness of what held it together in the first place.

Perhaps this is the real crisis behind the institutional collapses I wrote about last week. The Saudi’s weren’t really renting (for $200 million) the opera productions the Met Opera would bring with them, they were purchasing the cultural credential of the Met, a signifier of the “best.” When Brand America got tarnished because of Trump’s war, that cultural authority lost its value and the Saudi’s bailed.

More examples from this week: The Guardian now has more American readers than the Washington Post. This isn’t just a change in market share. It’s a significant marker in the transfer of editorial authority from a paper that has abdicated its cultural reputation to one that has conscientiously sought to build a place for its journalistic purpose. Then there’s the report that the Adelaide Writers Week was sacrificed to save the broader festival, trading custodial function for fiscal survival. News publishers are blocking AI scrapers — and killing the Wayback Machine in the process, defending revenue by destroying the archive that made their work findable and helping to attach it to the wider cultural record.

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose. The New York Times this week catalogued the rise of classical-music podcasts where listeners want structural analyses of specific symphonies. K-pop fans put their bodies through training regimens like elite athletes to perform choreography they’ve internalized down to the breath. The number of indie bookstores has grown 70 percent in six years, beating Amazon by selling not inventory but curation and community. The New Yorker devotes a long essay to how Martha Graham’s revolution still reshapes what dancers can do. A Mauritanian librarian fights the desert to keep medieval manuscripts intact in a town where the people are leaving. One obsessive in India is single-handedly trying to save the 30 percent of pre-1950 Indian films that haven’t already been lost.

Sure, these are anecdotal stories, but these are stories from just one week. One might argue that at one level, while the surface of culture has become ever shallower, it also offers more opportunity to dive deep.

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 lineage, for the why — has migrated to wherever audiences and individuals can build their own context and throughlines. Sometimes those lines are deep obsessive study. Sometimes they are skimming across the surface of micro-videos and news of the day.

So is our historical system of assembling cultural authority disappearing? Perhaps it’s being relocated — from credentials and vertical hierarchies to some new expansive assemblage of connective work. From who or what you are in an institutional frame, to whether you can show people how the pieces fit. That’s actually what Horowitz has argued is the role of cultural institutions for a long time. At a time when institutional credential is under broad attack, the ability to make a case for why culture matters has to move beyond bromides and platitudes and assertion of credentials to curation that matters.

And perhaps this is where AI changes the stakes. AI floods the zone with what looks like cultural memory — assembled out of the common body but stripped of any context for it. The slop is constructed from collective memory but also actively decoupling people from the contexts that made the memory mean anything in the first place. Institutions that abandon their custodial and curatorial role won’t be missed in an AI world. They’ll be replaced by it. The difference between a tradition and a vibe is whether anyone is still telling you how the pieces connect.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be making our stand on defending the old gatekeeping. I suspect that fight is over. The work is provenance — not as ownership, but as connective essential. Make the lineage legible. Not the orchestra program of disconnected pretty pieces. Not the museum that mistakes spectacle for meaning. We can’t and shouldn’t outsource cultural memory to algorithms. In order for culture to have meaning, it needs context, and the richer the better.

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Also Worth Your Attention This Week

The Adelaide Writers Week story is more revealing than it looks. Internal documents confirm that South Australia’s literary week was killed to preserve the broader and important arts festival that has a $60M economic impact. It was an explicit choice to keep the form (the festival) and shed the function (literary memory). Writers’ weeks are exactly the kinds of places where context gets attached to text in front of an audience. Killing one to save a festival is trading context for fiscal survival. Watch whether other festivals make the same trade quietly in the next eighteen months.

Germany’s call to novelist Matthias Jügler is another side of the throughline problem. When the German government called the author about Mayfly Season and asked which historical sources he’d consulted — and what period he was planning to tackle next — the state was making a claim about who gets to write the story of the GDR’s stolen-children scandal. That’s not just censorship; it’s a custody fight over collective memory. Fictional treatments of recent history are going to keep being a front in these wars.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

This week on ArtsJournal we picked a story from the Wall Street Journal about the Vegas Sphere, which by all accounts delivers a spectacular experience. The project was built for $2.3 billion, about a billion dollars over budget, and completed in 2023. The Sphere has been a remarkable success, now the highest-grossing arena in the world —”$379 million on 1.7 million tickets sold last year, according to Pollstar.” And a smaller version is now planned for Washington DC.

That got me to thinking: just what are the various culture industries worth and how do they compare? Every year we hear about debates to cut or raise the budgets of the NEA NEH ($207 million each this year). So how does this funding compare not just in the non-profit arts world, but in the larger creative economy? So I decided to do some digging.

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, and nonprofit board meetings live in, and the world where most people actually encounter culture — is so large that it’s worth pausing to measure.

What follows is a set of tables. The premise is simple: if you put the budgets of the largest US nonprofit arts institutions next to the revenues of the companies that produce most of the culture Americans consume, you start to see why debates inside arts circles often feel disconnected from the broader gravitational field of culture. They are.

Three things worth surfacing before the numbers and then I’ll get out of the way.

The largest US nonprofit arts institution is the Smithsonian, with about a $1.1 billion total budget — roughly 70 percent of which is federal appropriation. That figure is only about 3 percent of what the Disney Parks division earned in revenue last year. Disney Parks alone — not Disney’s whole company, just the parks — pulls in more revenue than the entire global recorded music industry.

The European model is genuinely different in scale and structure. State subsidy is not a top-up to ticket sales there; it’s the foundation. The Vienna State Opera covers about 55 percent of its budget from public money. London’s Tate Museum’s most recent annual report shows public grants falling, deficit budgets, and “self-generated income not increasing post-pandemic at the same pace as the cost base.” The story is the same across the continent, with the dial turned to different points on the public/private spectrum.

So something to consider: A lot of what we call “culture policy” in the US is policy for less than 0.5 percent of the cultural economy by revenue. Americans for the Arts puts the nonprofit arts and culture sector at $151.7 billion in total economic activity and 2.6 million jobs. Disney alone employs 233,000 people. The NFL did $23 billion in revenue last year, by itself larger than the operational spending of every US nonprofit arts organization combined. None of this means the nonprofit arts don’t matter. It means that when we argue about $207 million in NEA appropriations, we are arguing about a rounding error in the broader cultural economy. Perhaps the conversation should grow up to the size of the field it’s trying to describe.

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This isn’t a complaint, it’s an attempt at a map, and my arbitrary version at that. I think you make different decisions about where to put energy when you can see where things actually are.

1. The 10 largest US nonprofit arts/cultural institutions

Most recent fiscal year available (FY2023 or FY2024). Operating expenses unless noted.

Notes The Smithsonian is technically a federal trust instrumentality, not a 501(c)(3); about 70% of its budget is federal appropriation. The Getty Trust runs almost entirely off endowment draw — it’s a different financial creature than peers funded primarily by tickets, philanthropy, and government. Lincoln Center, the campus organization, is separate from the Met Opera, NY Philharmonic, NY City Ballet, and Lincoln Center Theater, which are independent constituent tenants with their own budgets. The Met Opera’s FY24 audited statements were not fully released at the time of writing; so the figure here is an estimate based on prior years and reported deficit. Also: I omitted the Kennedy Center, which in prior years most certainly would have made the list. But who knows really what the numbers are now.

Combined top-10 operating spend: roughly $3.5–3.8 billion. That is approximately 11% of Disney Parks’ annual revenue.

Sources: Smithsonian FY2024; Met Museum 990 (ProPublica); Getty Financials; Met Opera Annual Reports; MoMA FY24; AMNH Financial Statements; Lincoln Center 990 (ProPublica); BSO Annual Reports; Carnegie Hall Financials; SF Opera Finances.

2. The largest European arts institutions

European data is harder to assemble cleanly than US data. Different countries report on different fiscal calendars, in different currencies, and many institutions are units of larger municipal or state cultural enterprises rather than freestanding entities. This is a partial list — institutions where current-year figures are publicly reported. The point is the order of magnitude and the funding mix, not a strict ranking.

Notes. Currency conversion uses approximate 2024 averages. German state opera houses (Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden) typically don’t publish freestanding budgets — their funding is woven into state cultural appropriations, which can be substantial but aren’t directly comparable. La Scala, the Prado, and the Reina Sofia were not included due to data quality issues for 2024. Russian institutions excluded.

The headline pattern: the largest European institutions are smaller in absolute terms than their US peers, but they receive significantly higher direct public support. The Louvre’s budget is roughly 60 percent of the Met Museum’s; the difference is that the Met has to raise nearly all of its operating revenue from ticket revenue, philanthropy, endowment, and city support, while the Louvre’s salaries, security, and maintenance are paid by the French state.

Sources: Tate ARA 2023–24; British Museum ARA 2023–24; Royal Ballet & Opera Annual Report; Vienna State Opera reporting; Opéra National de Paris; Louvre.

3. The size of culture industries (global revenue, 2024)

What the list reveals. Video games alone are larger than recorded music, global theatrical film, and live music combined. Book publishing — which we routinely talk about as a sector “in trouble” — is roughly three times the size of recorded music. The entire US nonprofit arts and culture sector’s organizational spending ($73.3B) is in the same range as global recorded music revenue, and smaller than US theme park spending. The Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account‘s $1.17 trillion figure includes everything cultural — commercial film studios, streaming platforms, publishers, museums, performers — which is why it dwarfs every line item above it.

4. The 10 largest commercial culture companies (most recent FY)

Notes. Pure-play comparison is hard because most of these companies are conglomerates with mixed segments. Comcast is mostly broadband, not media. Sony is mostly electronics and finance. Tencent is mostly games and a Chinese super-app. Where possible, we’ve separated out the culture-relevant segment revenue with the conglomerate total flagged.

Disney alone — at $91.7B — produces more annual revenue than every US nonprofit arts and culture organization combined ($73.3B in organizational spending per AEP6). And that’s one company.

Sources: company 10-Ks, 20-Fs, and annual reports; Disney FY2024 Earnings.

5. The 10 highest-revenue sports teams (most recent reported)

This list mixes North American leagues and European football because they operate on different revenue models — the NFL’s revenue-sharing produces a tight cluster of teams in the $600M–$1.2B range, while European football’s commercial-first model creates a wider spread.

Note. The Cowboys had an estimated $629M operating profit on $1.22B revenue last year — meaning the Cowboys’ profit alone was larger than the operating budget of every US nonprofit arts institution.

League-wide totals:

• NFL: $23B (2024)

• MLB: $12.1B (2024)

• NBA: $11.3B (2024)

• NHL: ~$6.6B (2023–24)

• Premier League: ~£6.3B / ~$8B (2023–24)

Sources: Forbes / Sportico NFL valuations 2025; Deloitte Football Money League 2025; Sportico: How NFL teams make money; MLB 2024 revenue.

6. The 10 most-attended theme parks (2024)

Top 25 parks combined attendance: ~246 million (2024).

Disney’s 12 parks drew 140 million visitors globally in 2024 — about 34% of the top-25 total. For comparison: 140 million is about 50% more than the total annual attendance for every nonprofit performing arts and museum visit in the United States combined per AEP6 audience data.

Disney Parks division revenue (FY2024): $34.1 billion. That’s more than ten times the combined operating budgets of the ten largest US nonprofit arts institutions on the table above.

Sources: TEA Global Experience Index 2024; AECOM Theme Index; Disney FY2024 Earnings.

7. Jobs: nonprofit arts vs. commercial culture

The asymmetry. Disney’s parks workforce (156,000) is larger than the combined headcount of every US nonprofit performing arts company and museum (~258,000) — and Disney is one company. A single Disney park (Walt Disney World, ~80,000) has a workforce roughly 60% the size of every US nonprofit performing arts company combined.

One more comparison point. The combined federal NEA appropriation ($207M, FY2025) plus all 56 state and jurisdictional arts agency appropriations (~$755M, FY2024) totals about $965M. That is roughly 2.8% of Disney Parks’ 2024 revenue, and about 4.2% of NFL annual revenue. Federal cultural support to all of US nonprofit arts is a smaller annual expenditure than what one NFL team (the Dallas Cowboys) earned in profit last year.

So what?

A few things become hard to argue with once you see the numbers.

The nonprofit arts sector is small relative to the cultural economy it sits inside. That doesn’t make it unimportant. It makes it specific. It’s a bounded sector with particular roles — preservation, transmission, training, experimentation, civic gathering — that the commercial sector doesn’t necessarily perform on its own. But the mistake is talking about non-profit culture as if it were the cultural economy.

The commercial culture economy is dominated by a handful of mega-players, and it’s increasingly built around scaled experiences (parks, sports, gaming, streaming) rather than around singular cultural productions. The growth is in the systems that consume time, not in the things people own.

Europe still treats cultural infrastructure as a public utility. The US treats it as a philanthropic enterprise. Neither model is producing comfortable institutions right now — both Tate and the Met Museum are running deficits — but the logic of why is different.

The instrumentalization argument that nonprofit arts must justify themselves economically is structurally rigged against the nonprofits. Of course they look small. They are small. The “we contribute X to the economy” argument is one nonprofits cannot win at scale. The argument has to be about what the nonprofit sector does that the commercial sector can’t or won’t do — and that argument requires comfort with the size differential, not denial of it.

Where the money is shapes who shapes culture. The largest cultural employers in this country are theme parks and streaming services. The largest cultural exporters are gaming companies and Hollywood studios. The cultural conversation in the non-profit sphere — opera, museums, theater, dance, classical music, etc. — is happening in the small percentage of the cultural economy where nonprofits operate. That’s still significant. But it’s also worth knowing how big the rest of the room is.

So often I see conversations about the health of non-profit arts and policy discussions about the arts as if the universe is non-profit. So how might the perspective change when you consider non-profit arts next to the larger culture economy?

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I compiled this data as of April 2026. All figures sourced from primary documents (audited financials, annual reports, government accounts, industry trade body releases) where available, with substitution to credible secondary reporting where primary documents were not publicly accessible. Currency conversions use approximate 2024 averages. Where ranges or estimates are given, the underlying figure was either not published, contested across sources, or required interpolation across fiscal years

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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 deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter was not the eye-popping rental fee. Nor even the fact it was taking up residence in the Middle East. Numerous Western cultural institutions—from the Louvre to the Guggenheim to NYU—have chased the money and set up shop there in recent decades.

No, the thing that jumped out was that it wasn’t a signed deal. Instead, it was a “memorandum of understanding” with details to be worked out. That the Met went ahead and announced this with no final deal in place and with fanfare is an indication how desperate the Met’s financial situation is. That same Times story reported that the company had drawn down its endowment by $120 million (a third of the total) since the pandemic, just to pay its operating bills, not for any new initiative.

So this week’s announcement that the deal had fallen apart was not entirely a surprise. It follows reports that the Saudis are likely bailing on their enormous investment in LIV golf, the flashy high stakes international rival to the PGA Tour.

The Met now has a $30 million hole to fill by July 31. Its endowment, drawn down since 2022, has fallen from $340 million to $216 million. The institution is preparing to sell naming rights to the opera house, sell its two Chagall murals to a private buyer who agrees to leave them on the wall, and wait roughly a year for a $100 million bequest that hasn’t yet cleared probate. None of this is fundraising. This is liquidation of irreplaceable assets to keep the lights on.

This week in Opera America Magazine, I reported on an alarming new report on the health of the field. Opera companies are spending nearly twice what they spent in 1999 to produce roughly a third fewer productions, while earned revenue has dropped from 41% of budgets to somewhere between 12 and 20%. Opera has eroded into an almost entirely philanthropic enterprise from what was once a marginally commercial one. The Saudi deal was only the highest-profile attempt yet to import dollars to prop up a cultural business model which no longer works. And not just in America.

Examples abound. From just the past week: Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre is exploring a sale. Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Cape Cod is suspending operations in June. The Berlin Modern’s opening has slipped another eight months to 2030 over moisture damage and microbial contamination on a building that has now been delayed roughly a decade. A pioneering Greek arts institution announced it is calling it quits with the gracious line “we’ve done what we set out to do.” Hampshire College, the country’s most ambitious experimental liberal-arts college, is winding down — described in New York Review of Books not as another liberal-arts domino but as “the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education in the US.” San Diego is proposing to cut its arts budget. Layoffs at Artnet and Artsy, as the two merge. This isn’t bad luck distributed randomly across the field.

Then there’s Arkansas Public Television, which announced a $3 million challenge grant — explicitly conditional on the station remaining affiliated with PBS. A donor putting a price on institutional affiliation. Contingent patronage. The donor as gatekeeper of mission. This is the other end of the same story: when revenue collapses and dollars get scarce, the people writing the checks get to redefine what the institution is for. The Saudis held the cards with the Met; the Arkansas donor is telling Arkansas PBS what kind of station it has to remain to be worth funding. Riyadh is just the largest version of an arrangement that is moving up and down the field.

America was a brand the Saudis were interested in investing in. Not because they love opera. Or golf, or wanted to be like America. But because it served their financial interests. Trump’s chaos in the Middle East has made America’s brand toxic. And just like that, the Saudis dumped the deals. In the UK, activists have protested the culture sponsorships of Big Oil and Big Pharma. Sponsorships and philanthropic largess thinned, prompting pleas from some arts organizations for protesters to be gentler.

So the real lesson isn’t that the Met chose a bad partner. Or that the Met has become artistically moribund or has been mismanaged. We can argue about any of these and if it were just the Met we could The lesson is that the structures supporting cultural production are really broken—so much so that America’s largest performing arts institution isn’t immune (and No. 2, the Kennedy Center, isn’t in very good shape these days, either). Sure, plenty of cultural institutions are doing okay, and some are even thriving. But the background economics—the civic infrastructure—is in huge distress.

Philanthropy is a perilous game. Funders have short attention spans, shifting values, and goals that often diverge from the projects and organizations they choose to support. In America corporate support largely dried up a couple decades ago. In the last decade, big national foundations (with a few notable exceptions) exited.

Will the donor pipeline come back? It probably doesn’t, not at the volumes the existing infrastructure was built to consume. The question is whether institutions can rebuild a direct relationship with their communities, reassembling the middleware that was once the essential civic glue that helped define communities. This is not just an arts problem.

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The geopolitics of arts patronage is being rewritten in real time. The EU cut €2 million from the Venice Biennale over Russia’s inclusion; the Biennale’s own jury announced it won’t consider nations whose leaders face ICC crimes-against-humanity charges, effectively removing Russia and Israel from top-prize contention. Berlin’s culture chief resigned over the irregular distribution of €2.6 million in antisemitism funds. These are not three different stories. They are evidence that the political conditions on cultural funding — what governments fund, what international bodies recognize, what donors will tolerate — are getting renegotiated in public, on shorter timelines, with sharper consequences than American nonprofits are used to. Boards and funders here would do well to assume the same scrutiny is coming.

Green shoots, they are a-changing. The National Gallery of Art received a $116 million gift to fund loaning works to museums nationwide. Artists Count launched a $1.3 million binational fund for individual artists in San Diego and Tijuana. These don’t look like the gifts that built the existing infrastructure — capital campaigns, named buildings, endowment grants. They are designed to put resources into circulation rather than into single institutional ambitions. If the old infrastructure is contracting, the next wave of philanthropy may end up looking less like cathedral-building and more like network-weaving. That might not be a bad direction.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

The LA County Museum of Art has always been a museum on its own terms. Housed in what felt like a ramshackle architectural hodgepodge of period buildings built around an outdoor plaza, its fascinating collections belied the setting. Instead of the stone palaces with imposing grand entrances housing the treasures of its East Coast and European museum counterparts, LACMA felt messy, disjointed... comfy. That very much suited the personalities of the city it’s in, a sprawling megalopolis that resists being reduced to any single label.

With the opening of architect Peter Zumthor’s new $724 million David Geffen building, a 110,000-square-foot concrete arc curving across Wilshire Boulevard and replacing the old hodgepodge, LACMA has made a bold statement not just with a building, but about what it believes is the museum’s role in contemporary culture. It’s the culmination of 20 years of self-examination and argument, not just about architecture, but more foundational, what it means to be a museum now.

Reaction has been sharp. The building has been called a triumph, a bunker, a curvaceous concrete sandwich, a cringey sculpture, and an experience that is “rule-bending, alive, disorienting, ambitious.” Love it or hate it, this is a museum I suspect, that will provoke many more debates than it will ever answer. All of these reactions are correct in their own way. What interest me, though, are the arguments the building makes about what a museum is for. And, just as important, what that argument costs.

The notion of a museum has evolved over the modern era. There have been three big roles. The first was as repository: Enlightenment taxonomies, encyclopedic collections, and proof that a civilization could catalogue itself. The second was teacher: the 20th-century civic canon, wall labels, period rooms, the museum as night school for a literate public. The third is one the Geffen building is betting everything on: experience and encounter—museum as a place where you have discovery.

The cultural historian Andras Szanto has been exploring this arc for a while now through three books examining the evolving relationships between culture and the museums they create. He suggests that each version of museum answers a different cultural moment. The new Geffen galleries look to be the most committed answer to the third question that anyone has built at this scale.

In a way, this is fitting. LACMA has always been a museum in search of itself. A middle-aged institution in a city without a center, it has rebuilt and rebranded itself roughly once a decade. The decision under director Michael Govan to demolish four Pereira buildings and hand the site to a Swiss architect known mostly for chapels in Alpine pastures is audacious in a way probably only Los Angeles could be. (Imagine a Boston or New York attempting it)

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The Zumthor you get at Geffen is not the European Zumthor. His European projects Therme Vals and the Bruder Klaus field chapel are vertical, contemplative, intimate, buildings where the material does most of the talking because there is little else. The Geffen, on the other hand, is horizontal, urban, secular, and spread out across a boulevard suspended over traffic. It is Zumthor’s most public and least monastic work. What does this say about what LACMA wanted? The building is to be the argument.

Because inside, the art follows none of the usual anchors. No Medieval or Impressionist galleries or any traditional intellectual organization to help guide you through. The context for the art, if there is one, is that art is a conversation across time of cultures and ideas and objects, organized around a metaphor of oceanic swirls.

But is it the right argument to be making in this moment? In a world drowning in calorie-less AI slop, in relentless context-free scrolls on screens we all seem mesmerized by, context is emerging as a thing of enormous value. It is what the algorithm cannot reproduce. It is what museums have historically been better at than anyone else — provenance, chronology, influence, argument, dissent, the chain of “this painter saw that painter and decided to break with her.” 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 remarkable about the way Constable painted light, and how did it have an effect on the painters who came after?

The Geffen galleries walk away from this on purpose. There is no chronology. There are no departments defending their turf. All 15 curatorial departments can display anywhere, and none of them own the walls. The organizing principle, as Govan and the curators have pitched it, is four bodies of water — Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic — with 78 thematic sections operating as “oceanic flow.” Turkish calligraphy next to Reni. A 1963 Studebaker Avanti next to a Carlos Almaraz crash painting. Winslow Homer and Betye Saar in a room about transatlantic slavery.

Reading those pairings, you can see the ambition. Walking through them, you can also see the price.

The physical building is, in its own terms, remarkable. The concrete does something I did not expect: it recedes. It exerts a pure physical presence — the seismic engineering lets the whole thing sway five feet in an earthquake — and then it shuts up and lets the art be whatever it is. It does not fuss. It does not frame. It does not editorialize. The art looks gorgeous against the concrete, and because it’s been given room to breathe, it invites you to contemplate it on its own terms.

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The glass envelope surrounding the concrete boxes is a portal to Los Angeles. You look up from a drawing and there are palm trees and traffic lights. It collapses the distance museums usually cultivate and makes the building continuous with its city.

But the natural light is both protagonist and problem. Reflections on glass. Glare on paint. Mark Lamster at the Dallas Morning News called out the “serious glare and silhouetting problems,” and he is not wrong. On the other hand, I can imagine visiting at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and having two completely different experiences. So is this a feature or a bug? I’m not entirely sure.

The other problem with the light is the contrast between “outside” galleries and “inside.” The building is a continuous curve, with the changing light from the outside pouring in (there are simi-transparent drapes to protect the art). Arranged in the interior are 27 concrete “boxes” which are smaller galleries. These are oddly unpleasant spaces by contrast with the flowing larger “outside” galleries. They replace traditional “wings” at most museums and allow for a concentration on one idea or another. But they are dimly lit so your eyes have to adapt from the larger daylight spaces. And—I realize this is a bit unkind—they seem like cramped prisons for the art. This may be because outside the boxes you encounter the art on your journey through the building. Inside the boxes, you’re interrupted, enclosed.

As you walk through the broad spaces, there is a series of tables in the middle of the rooms, with objects just sitting there, as if they’d been laid out in a jewelers shop. This is both strangely unsettling but also incredibly intimate. You approach the object the way you would approach something on a sideboard in a collector’s living room. No vitrine, no stanchion. You worry, briefly, for it. You get over it — the things are firmly anchored — and you are closer to them than traditional museum convention.

But here I get to the real cost of this approach. Art is a vocabulary. It is a language of subversions and celebrations, revivals and rejections, arguments and counterarguments running across centuries. How do you know a work is audacious if you don’t know what it’s being audacious against? How do you know a painting is a rebellion without a tradition behind it? Or that this or that innovation made everything after it (which to modern eyes looks commonplace) a different conversation?

Strip away chronology and movement, and the audacious and the derivative look identical. So do the profound and the decorative. A Reni becomes a pretty thing. A Turkish calligraphy becomes a pretty thing. The Bacon becomes an especially intense pretty thing. The work doesn’t stop being art, but the museum abdicates helping you read it.

Art without context is ornament, but is it what we want museums to do? I’m reminded of San Francisco’s Ice Cream Museum. No real meaning. But it sure was fun.

Crystal Bridges in Arkansas, places art in its galleries not by art movement or style, but around ideas. So you’ll encounter art side-by-side from different eras and cultures but in a way intended to create a conversation. Look at this inspiring Western landscape. But right next to it something that draws your attention to a less-told less-glamorous story of the West. The juxtaposition of the art is unexpected (as here at Geffen), but Crystal Bridges is all about the context, messying up the narrative, challenging what you may have taken for granted. I wonder if LACMA has these ambitions, and if so, how it might happen.

So I have to admit to a complicated set of reactions. Because the other thing the Geffen galleries do is let you look at physical objects as physical objects. Not as data points in a wall-label narrative. Not as exemplars of a movement. Just as things made by people. The concrete frames without imposing. The light is generous. The absence of vitrines is incredibly cool.

This is actually an old idea. The white cube gallery was modernism’s insistence that art speak for itself. But it was invented for audiences who already spoke the vocabulary. It assumed the context was already in the viewer’s head. Geffen revives this for audiences who may not carry that context. Whether that is a brilliant adaptation, a beautiful concession, or just plain incoherence, is the open question of the building.

This week we collected 134 stories on ArtsJournal.com. [subscribe] Here’s what I learned:

The whether-AI-can-make-art debate is by now a well-worn trope. It’s actually a tedious question. If we still haven’t been able to come up with a definitive answer to the age-old college dorm room question “what is art” then how are we supposed to be able to judge whether AI can make it? A small study published this week offers a more interesting question, I think: researchers found that watching experimental films boosts creative thinking in ways that watching YouTube videos doesn’t. The algorithmic feed isn’t neutral, it turns out. It’s actively training minds toward patterns of consumption that are the opposite of what creative cognition requires.

That’s interesting enough. But consider it next to some other stories this week and an even more interesting question arises:

Thousands of AI-generated books are flooding the market written in the style of living authors and not just competing with them economically but saturating the reading marketplace with optimized, frictionless prose. Then there are the tech companies that are racing to give chatbots emotional intelligence, engineering machines to perform the very qualities — empathy, nuance, sensitivity — that we’ve always considered distinctively human. So machines are getting better at mimicking human depth while humans are being trained by feeds that reward shallow processing. Meet you in the middle?

Even journalism is feeling it. A fascinating essay this week suggested that the anecdotal lede, that longstanding workhorse of narrative journalism, has outlived its utility in an attention economy that’s already optimizing every story opening for maximum engagement. When the algorithm is actively shaping both the creator and receiver, what’s left?

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 art requires. Tolerance for ambiguity. Patience with difficulty. The willingness to be bored before a breakthrough. The experimental film study reinforces something artists and educators have been saying for years — that the medium of consumption reshapes the consumer. Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message. Right now, the dominant medium is optimized for the exact opposite of creative risk.

As Ezra Klein recently observed on his podcast, while it’s possible to outsource the work in making something creative, that act of making is how creative people learn and grow. Art isn’t efficient. It’s struggle. Difficulty. A process in which you learn something on the journey that informs and enriches the result. Perhaps outsourcing the hard parts to AI condemns the artist to never transcending what he or she might most learn from in order to evolve.

And for a generation of audience trained on the everyday experience of consuming algorithmic feeds, perhaps there's less tolerance for the messy unpredictability of the live artistic work, which is really where we'd like to think art lives? Why would I buy tickets for experiences I've been trained to filter out?

And then there was this curious counterpoint: Spotify announced a partnership with independent live music venues this week. Perhaps a quiet concession that algorithmic discovery can’t replicate what happens when people gather in a room with a stage? The feed can recommend. It can’t transform. It can’t evolve in unexpected ways. Perhaps that distinction in an AI world may turn out to matter more than any copyright debate.

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America’s only accredited circus school closed. Philadelphia’s Circadium School of Contemporary Circus shut down this week, not because students didn’t want to attend but because it couldn’t access federal student aid. The credentialing infrastructure, the system that decides what counts as legitimate training, didn’t have a category for this kind of instruction. It’s a small story, but perhaps it suggests something more important? When the systems that certify and fund are designed for a narrow set of institutional forms, everything that doesn’t fit the template gets quietly squeezed out, regardless of demand.

Author Helen DeWitt declined a $175,000 literary prize. The novelist turned down a prestigious award this week, and the reaction out in the world was fascinating — a mixture of admiration and bafflement that someone would refuse official rewards. In a culture that increasingly treats prizes as the validation that makes an artistic career legible, choosing to step outside that circuit is its own kind of statement about what recognition is for.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.

This week we collected 128 stories on ArtsJournal [subscriber here]. Here’s what I learned:

We are drowning in slop.

That’s essentially the diagnosis in Derek Thompson’s sharp essay this week on what he calls “zombie flow,” the algorithmic compulsion to produce vast quantities of content nobody particularly wants. Streaming platforms commissioning shows designed not to be great but to fill a queue. Studios greenlighting sequels to sequels because the algorithm rewards familiarity. Bollywood racing to adopt AI production tools not to make better films but to make more of them faster. The logic is industrial: keep the line moving, and volume is its own justification.

But volume isn’t a strategy, it’s an anxiety. And several of this week’s stories suggest that the institutions and people who understand this are starting to act.

The London Times cut its story count by 20 to 30 percent. The result: more readers, more engagement, more subscriptions — significantly more. Fewer stories, each one carrying more weight turned out to be what the audience actually wanted. Not more, but better.

That word better is doing a lot of work right now across the culture. For decades, institutions could lean on a kind of credential shorthand. Trust us, we’re the museum. We’re the newspaper. We’re the publisher. Quality was often asserted not demonstrated. And that worked for a long time because the institutions controlled the distribution and the audience had limited alternatives. I wrote last week about another version of this — the “excellence problem” — and the importance of getting a more precise definition of what excellence is.

As Thompson reports about zombie culture, the mindless slop has arrived in a tsunami. How does the “good stuff” even find us, lost in the swirling eddies? More important, with all the background noise, do we even recognize “good?”

The AI detection tools that were supposed to authenticate human-made writing can’t reliably tell human from machine, and the technology built to certify quality has itself become unreliable. Then there’re these stories, authentication barriers erected by humans:

• Iowa courts are upholding book bans, deciding which ideas are legitimate by judicial fiat.

• The Holocaust Museum is quietly editing its own exhibits, removing contemporary parallels before anyone officially demands it.

• The Trump administration abandoned its appeal to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services — but zeroed out the funding anyway.

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 work and construct a context, making the case not by institutional credential but by demonstration.

LACMA spent $724 million not to build a bigger museum but to rebuild an argument for what an encyclopedic museum means in 2026. What it collects, how it contextualizes, and who it’s for. Instead of expansion, It’s a hopeful sharpening of curation at the institutional level. When the market is swamped with slop, curation and editing matter more.

A few weeks ago I wrote about going to the Met Opera’s “Tristan” at my local movie house and there being only three people (including me) in the audience. The Met is bleeding cash. Met HD streaming performances used to regularly sell out all over the world. I wrote in the LA Times back in 2007 when the HD simulcasts began that “the Met has reinvented the form. Or rather, it has created a new art form, judging by the Jan. 13 moviecast of Tan Dun’s new opera The First Emperor. This venture may be the most significant development in opera since the supertitle.”

The Met made the case for opera in the movie theatre by treating it as a new form in a new visual language. It really worked. But this Tristan in movie form was visually incoherent on the screen, a facsimile of what was on the stage. Where once the HD productions worked at being evocative and original, a “new art form,” these productions have long since diminished to second rate experiences. The audience has noticed. The Met pedigree can no longer deliver an audience.

But back to this week. The Writers Guild of America’s new four-year deal didn’t just negotiate better pay. It put dollar figures on the claim that the human writer, the person with a point of view, not just an output, has a value that can’t be automated away. Now the writers have to make that case with their work. The Times didn’t just cut volume. It made each remaining story carry more weight and then measured whether the audience noticed. They clearly did.

A lot of what passed for quality in institutional culture was orthodoxy dressed up as standards. “We’re the experts” was a shortcut. It papered over the hard work of actually demonstrating why this particular thing in this particular moment matters to you specifically, not to some abstract notion of culture. That shortcut has stopped working for a while now, and I think the institutions that will matter will be those willing to do the harder thing: not assert quality and relevance but prove it in terms their audiences can feel.

The slop is going to get much worse. But editing and curation and intentionality are becoming the new cultural currency. And scarcity, as any economist will tell you, is where value lives.

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The Smithsonian keeps losing leaders. The Hirshhorn’s director became the fourth senior Smithsonian departure in two years. The pattern isn’t coincidence, it’s a strategy of attrition. You don’t need to fire anyone if the environment becomes inhospitable enough that talented people leave on their own. The question for the institutions still standing: at what point does self-preservation shade into complicity?

Live Nation’s antitrust trial is really about who owns live culture. The DOJ’s case against Live Nation frames the issue as monopoly pricing, but the deeper question is infrastructure. When one company controls the venues, the ticketing, and the promotion, it doesn’t just set prices — it determines what gets performed and where. Meanwhile, musicians are saying publicly that touring has become financially unsustainable. The monopoly isn’t just extracting money. It’s hollowing out the culture around it.

Josh Kline argues New York’s art world is dying of real estate, not taste. His viral essay makes the case that galleries aren’t closing because art isn’t selling, they’re closing because landlords can charge more for retail. Culture follows real estate, not the other way around. It’s a bracing reminder that the crisis in the arts isn’t always about the arts.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.

In the last six months, we’ve seen a surge in traffic at ArtsJournal. That’s great, right? But when I looked at server logs, we found that 70 percent of that surge was machines —bots— not people. We aren’t alone. According to recent reports, automated traffic hit 51 percent of global web activity in December 2025, the first time in a decade that machines outnumbered people online. AI and large language model crawlers alone quadrupled their share of web traffic in eight months, from 2.6 percent to over 10 percent. By the end of last year, there was roughly one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits to a website. A year earlier, the ratio was one in 200.

So is the web being abandoned to the machines? This isn’t a hyperbolic question. It has big implications for publishers who count on human visitors to sell to advertisers, and that’s worth a whole other story.

But there are also big implications for any artist or arts organization who uses the web to find an audience for their work. Earlier this year I wrote about a future where AI agents could act as intermediaries for our cultural consumption, scouting shows, galleries, and concerts we might want, auditioning offerings based on what they know about our preferences. I thought we had three to five years before this became the dominant mode of cultural discovery.

I was wrong about the timeline. The rise of AI as a discovery engine is happening now. And it will upend how the arts will be found as well as help shape the tastes of a great many people. The next visitor to your website is increasingly likely to be a machine, not a person. And that machine is trying to decide whether to recommend you or not.

That sounds ominous. But if arts organizations can get past the initial panic, this shift offers something that a century of arts marketing never could. Not just a new channel for the same old messages, but a potentially different relationship with an audience.

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Google search queries are already declining. The research firm Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25 percent by 2026 due to AI chatbots and virtual agents, and the prediction is on schedule. More than a third of consumers now begin their searches with AI tools rather than typing into Google, and for many queries, the AI answer is the only answer anyone sees. Roughly 60 percent of Google searches now end without a single click.

This is the new middleware. Not the old civic middleware of local newspapers, arts councils, and community institutions, the connective tissue between creators and communities that has been collapsing for two decades. This is algorithmic middleware that’s been replacing the old kind at a pace that makes the collapse of newspapers look leisurely. It exists between the person who might want to see your show and the information about your show. And unlike a newspaper editor or a friend’s recommendation, it doesn’t convey passion or feeling. It processes metadata.

The immediate consequences are real. More than 60 percent of event websites delete or substantially alter their content within three months of an event ending. That destruction of content is one reason mid-tier arts organizations remain invisible to AI while mega-events compound their advantage.

And we already have a cautionary tale for what happens when you stop here. Call it the Stone Age of algorithmic culture: Spotify and Netflix. Their algorithms have become more conservative over time, not more adventurous, recycling what you already know rather than introducing what you don’t. Spotify’s retention metrics now count for three times more than play volume in the algorithm. A “30-second hook” culture has emerged. If a song doesn’t grab you immediately, the algorithm moves on. The familiar wins while the unknown gets buried.

Nobody set out to make culture blander. But when an algorithm can only optimize for what it can measure, and what it can measure is shallow — clicks, saves, repeat listens — the flattening happens almost in spite of everyone involved, for artists, listeners, even the platforms themselves. And it’s getting worse. In October, Spotify integrated directly into ChatGPT across 145 countries. Can you say stranglehold?

This is the primitive version of machine-mediated culture. The algorithm doesn’t know what a revelatory night at the theater feels like, it knows what people clicked on last time. If we stop here, we deserve what we get.

But here the argument gets more interesting, I think. The crude algorithm worked for music and movies because the friction between recommendation and consumption is essentially zero. Spotify says “try this,” you tap and you’re listening. The transaction cost of a miss is maybe thirty seconds. Netflix suggests a show, you click, and if it’s bad you bail after ten minutes. The algorithm doesn’t need to be sophisticated because it doesn’t need to persuade anyone of anything. It just needs to reduce the sea of options to a manageable list, and the near-zero cost of trying does the rest.

The analog arts are the ultimate unfamiliar experience because they’re a different experience every night. While Spotify optimizes for stasis (keeping you in a mood), an AI agent can optimize for transformation—which is a core value proposition of the performing arts.

We’re asking someone to make a significant commitment of tickets, time and traffic hassle to get there. The gap between discovery and decision is enormous. A crude recommendation — “people who liked X also liked Y” — doesn’t do it. If a bot is the “first audience,” the website needs to stop being a brochure and start being a knowledge base. You need something that can answer questions, address hesitations, and meet a specific person’s curiosity. You need, in other words, not a better algorithm but a conversation.

From Messages to Persuasion

And that’s the opportunity, I think. The instinct will be to treat the Rise-of-the-AI Bots as the next iteration of SEO, adapting to the new rules, optimizing the metadata, and tagging everything properly. And yes, these are the table stakes. If your website can’t be crawled and categorized, you’re invisible.

But stopping there misses the opportunity and the revolution.

For a century, arts marketing has been a broadcasting operation. You craft a message — a listing, an ad, a social media post — and fling it as widely as possible. It’s a message in a bottle thrown into a Sea of Messages, hoping some tiny percentage of bottles wash up on the right beaches. The entire model assumes that the job is getting the message out. Reach equals results. And that model, like the Spotify algorithm, works well enough when the cost of trying is low. But it has always been a poor fit for the performing arts, where every ticket is an act of faith.

The shift AI agents represent isn’t a new channel for the same old messages. It’s a shift from messaging to persuasion — from broadcasting to dialogue. A listing says: “Romeo and Juliet. Friday at 8. $55, starring so-and-so.” It conveys information but it’s useful only to people for whom that information already means something. An AI agent mediating between your organization and a potential audience member can do something a listing never could: find out what that person actually cares about and make the case accordingly. The hesitant parent gets a different conversation than the Shakespeare scholar. The classical music novice who finds Mahler overwhelming gets a different entry point than the subscriber who has heard thirty recordings of the Fifth.

This isn’t metadata optimization. This is the difference between a billboard and a conversation. And the performing arts, the art form with the highest transaction cost and the hardest discovery problem, may have the most to gain from it.

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Art as a Process, a Community, Not Product

Perhaps the opportunity goes deeper still, because it has to do with how we think about what art is.

We used to treat the performance as the discrete thing, the artistic act. But the internet and social media have been rewriting relationships between artist and audience for two decades. The artistic “experience” now extends to either side of the performance — the anticipation, the creation, the reaction, the culture that forms around the work. We know that audiences are fascinated by process. They research endlessly. They have an enormous appetite for going deeper into what they love. The community that gets built around the art is also part of the art.

The problem has always been scale. A marketing department can write a listing, send an email blast, post a social media clip, but it can’t have ten thousand different conversations with ten thousand different people about what makes this production worth their time.

AI agents can. I don’t mean that agents substitute for people. Who, really, wants to converse with a bot if they don’t have to? But they do want their specific, niche questions answered instantly without digging through a FAQ page. An AI agent can show you or point you in the direction of what you’re interested in. Show you the video, respond with a relevant history or storyline.

This is where the explosion of personal assistant bots could be interesting. Not as a threat that flattens culture into tags and metadata, but as the first technology that could let an arts organization engage deeply and individually with anyone who’s curious at scale. As I argued in my earlier post, what organizations need isn’t a better-tagged web page. It’s something more like a Digital Twin of their productions, an AI presence loaded with the DNA of the work that can meet you where your curiosity lives. Not a chatbot that tells you where to park. An intelligence that can make the case for why this production, this night, is worth your time and your fifty dollars and your babysitter and make it differently for every person who asks.

Those artists and organizations that can engage with what their audiences actually care about will build deeper relationships with the people who find them. And the people who find them will arrive already invested, already part of the community around the work, already “better” audience members.

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 conversation.

To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

This week we collected 113 stories on ArtsJournal. Here’s what I learned:

Next month, the French-Canadian harpsichordist Jean Rondeau will perform the Goldberg Variations three different ways in a single concert: solo keyboard in the traditional manner; arranged for strings, flute, and continuo; and a third approach he hasn’t yet revealed. In an interview with Bachtrack this week, he was asked: when does Bach cease to be Bach? It’s an interesting provocation, and also, I think, a useful way into a question about what is the essential essence of an artistic work and what it can or should do.

More than an abstract or academic question, though, it has relevance because of the currently raging debates about creativity and AI.

The AI creativity debate has landed on the question of “excellence” as a central pillar of resistance. The argument runs something like this: AI cannot produce genuinely excellent work because it lacks the training, the suffering, and the embodied human experience that excellence requires. Art is an expression of humanity. Therefore, human creativity is the apex of what art is or expresses and deserves protection. I have sympathy for the conclusion, but I think the argument is wrong. Or rather, it’s making different claims and calling them one.

Is it possible that what most of these arguments are actually defending is credentialism — the idea that excellence requires certain credentials, lineage, and preparation? Or provenance — the idea that human origin confers value? Both are real claims worth making, but they’re not excellence claims. Excellence is about what the work achieves. A piece of music either moves you, challenges you, realizes what it set out to do, or it doesn’t. The credential of the maker is a separate question. The origin of the maker is a separate question still. And the context in which you experience the work is yet another.

I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think these distinctions matter if we’re really going to figure out the place of AI in creativity. Four stories this week suggest layers to this debate:

Stanford Thompson, the musician and entrepreneur who runs Equity Arc and trained at the Curtis Institute, published an essay this week that explores this idea from a different direction. He describes sitting behind the audition table at Curtis and starting to notice something. He wasn’t just hearing musicianship, he was hearing “access layered over time expressing itself as readiness” — years of private instruction, quality instruments, coaches who knew the path. The student who cleared the bar looks excellent. The students who didn’t, often weren’t less talented, they were less prepared. We’ve been calling preparation merit and we’ve been calling credentials excellence. These are not the same thing, and this conflation has costs.

The historical performance movement, the decades-long project of recovering Baroque and Classical music performed on period instruments, finds itself asking a version of the same question. Nearly half a century on, practitioners are grappling with whether historically informed performance has calcified into its own orthodoxy. The revolutionary challenge of half a century ago to received standards has over time become the received standard. This is what happens when provenance (”authentic” instruments, “authentic” practice) substitutes for the excellence question.

At the Metropolitan Opera, director Yuval Sharon has staged Tristan und Isolde with a new ending: rather than dying, Isolde gives birth to a child during the opera’s final minutes. Much of the critical objection amounts to: Wagner didn’t intend this. That’s a provenance argument. Whether the staging is excellent — whether it produces something true and powerful and worth five hours of your attention — is an entirely different question, of course, and one the reviews are genuinely divided on. These are not the same debates, even though they’re being expressed in the same sentences.

Then there’s the Korean band BTS, which returned this week from mandatory military service to find the world had maybe move on. Their new album is, as Slate put it, maybe not that great. Their credentials haven’t changed; the provenance is intact. But the excellence question — does the music achieve what it sets out to do, in the moment it appears, and is it still fun, came back with a different answer.

This is actually a good moment to get precise about all three terms — provenance, credentials and excellence — because AI is increasingly forcing the question. Provenance matters: human lineage carries real value, and we should be honest about why. Credentialism matters: serious preparation produces things that underprepared shortcuts don’t.

But neither is a substitute for the excellence question itself and conflating them in the AI debate doesn’t solve anything. If an AI-generated creation achieves what it (or the human behind it) sets out to achieve — it moves people, it challenges assumptions, it does the work it was supposed to — that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent because it was made by AI. Rather, I think the response is that excellence isn’t the only thing we value. Provenance is also something we value. Context is important. Human experience too. We need to make the case for why these matter and how. That’s a more difficult, more honest, but ultimately more clarifying argument.

An organically-farmed tomato might look less appealing than an industrially-grown version with its glowing color and perfect shape. And in fact the Franken-mato might be better sometimes; organic vegetables can be a crapshoot. Both are tomatoes, but it’s the hidden qualities that make the case.

Also Worth Your Attention

When attendance becomes the measure of excellence, programming follows the metric. Denmark has restructured its museum subsidy model around visitor counts: institutions must now meet a minimum of 10,000 annual visitors to retain government support. This sounds like accountability, but it’s also a quiet redefinition. The institution that draws more people is the institution worth funding. Attendance captures popularity, not depth of engagement, educational reach, or the civic value of a collection. What Denmark is answering without quite saying so is whether museums exist to serve existing audiences or to expand them. That’s not a neutral question, and visitor counts don’t answer it neutrally.

The AI attribution scandal is also an access story. The twin disclosures this week — the New York Times dropping a freelancer for using AI in a review and Hachette pulling a novel under suspicion of AI authorship — framed the AI attribution question as a problem of authenticity and disclosure. Both are legitimate, but there’s perhaps a more troublesome question underneath. If AI assistance is invisible and increasingly ubiquitous, we should assume it will be used. And the writers most likely to be caught are perhaps those with the least economic ability to spend more hours on a piece: freelancers, not those staffers paid by institutions. Enforcement may end up measuring something other than what it claims to measure, which is, again, Stanford Thompson’s audition table problem, in a different room.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

What does it actually take for culture to reach an audience? A musician records a track, but then it has to travel through streaming platforms, distribution systems, search algorithms, and ticketing infrastructure to reach a listener who can afford to pay for it. A theatre company mounts a production and then has to reach potential audiences through social platforms whose design it doesn’t control, on devices it doesn’t own, via ticketing systems that extract fees it has no power to negotiate. A literary magazine publishes a writer and then has to survive in an attention economy whose rules were written for someone else’s profit entirely.

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, telecommunications firms, and entertainment conglomerates. The decisions about how all this works -- and more important -- how it will work in the future, are made in boardrooms and courtrooms where arts organizations are not present. So maybe none of the following stories at first seems like an “arts” story. And yet, the ripples of these legal and business stories this week will influence shape the arts ecosystem for years to come. So yes, they’re very much important arts stories.

Story No. 1. The “Dumb Pipe”: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously this week that internet provider Cox Communications can’t be held liable for music piracy by its users. In other words, the pipe isn’t responsible for what flows through it. That sounds like a win for open internet principles — and in some ways it is — but what it actually says is that infrastructure that profits from the distribution of creative work bears none of the cost or liability when that work is stolen. Someone makes music. Someone takes it. Cox gets to profit from the traffic either way. For a traditional arts organization, this means the “Digital Commons” has been confirmed as a place where we are expected to provide content for free, while the ISP charges the admission fee via the monthly subscription. If the pipe isn’t responsible for policing theft, the entire financial burden of protecting intellectual property shifts to the artist—a cost most independent creators simply cannot afford. There are good reasons why platform liability works this way; the telephone company isn’t liable for criminal conversations conducted over its network. And should networks really be policing content? Remember all those stories about Instagram removing pictures of classic art because... nudity? But read on...

Story No. 2. When “Engagement” Becomes a Liability. A California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products that harmed a young user; a New Mexico jury hit Meta for $375 million more. The legal theory — suing over platform design rather than platform content — routes around Section 230, the law that has shielded platforms from liability since 1996. As a detailed Techdirt analysis argues, the problem isn’t the verdict against Meta. It’s that the theory doesn’t stay confined to companies you don’t like. If every design decision about how to present content is now potential product liability, the cost of fighting those suits will drive smaller platforms out of existence, leaving only the giants who can absorb the litigation. These judgments also shift the legal focus from user-generated content (protected by Section 230) to product design, effectively creating a “product liability” for the internet. Critics argue this will make the web worse by forcing platforms to dismantle engaging features—like personalized feeds and notifications—to avoid “addiction” lawsuits and leading to a less functional user experience. Bottom line: while this looks like a victory for users over Facebook, it actually could further consolidate control of the internet in the mega-platforms. And BTW -- “addictive”? What kind of squishy standard is that? Who determines what’s addictive versus merely appealing design? If every design choice is a potential “product liability,” platforms will naturally pivot toward the “safe,” the bland, and the non-litigious.

Story No. 3. The Sora Pivot: Even Disney is a Tenant. Then there’s Sora. OpenAI shut down its AI video app this week — which was costing an estimated $15 million a day in compute costs to run while having generated only a total of $2.1 million in lifetime revenue. The service was facing deepfake liability from celebrity estates and copyright complaints from rights holders all while preparing for an anticipated IPO this year that requires cleaning up loss-making “side quests,” as an OpenAI product manager called them. The $1 billion strategic investment Disney announced in December — which I argued at the time was a signal that IP is now currency to buy influence inside infrastructure rather than a shield against it — never actually closed. No money had changed hands. With rival AI scaler Anthropic surging, OpenAI is now pivoting hard toward enterprise software and coding tools, and away from consumer entertainment. So the lesson isn’t that Sora failed, it’s that even the 800-pound gorilla of the creative world has no leverage. If Disney, with its incomparable vault of IP, can’t stop a platform from changing course, what hope does a regional ballet or a museum have? We are the tenants and the tech firms are the landlords. The landlords just decided to stop maintaining the theater to build a data center instead.

Story No. 4. The Silent Box Office Manager: So this is what it looks like to fight back and try to at least try to shape the infrastructure. The Canadian province of Manitoba is moving to ban algorithmic variable pricing — the practice of charging different prices to different customers based on behavioral profiling. It’s a retail story, sure. But variable algorithmic pricing is already embedding into ticketing, where it quietly determines who can afford to attend. Once firms get customers used to being sorted and priced differently, the Walrus notes, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it isn’t. It is a choice, and right now, governments are beginning to decide whether to let that choice stand. Arts organizations have spent the last decade focused on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). But if your ticketing platform uses “predictive modeling” to hike prices for “high-intent” users, it may be undoing your equity work behind your back. The algorithm is a box office manager who doesn’t care about your mission; it only cares about “optimum yield.”

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Patreon CEO Jack Conte charged this week that AI companies’ claims of fair use against individual creators while signing multimillion-dollar licensing deals with Disney, Condé Nast, Universal Music is a double standard. Two sets of rules are in play — one for institutions with the leverage to negotiate, and one for everyone else. That asymmetry runs through all four decisions this week. Cox, the platforms, OpenAI, the ticket pricing systems: in every case, the rules are being set by entities with interests that are not aligned with the creative sector and favor those who control the infrastructure. If this sounds familiar, it’s what happened 25 years ago as rules for the new world wide web were being negotiated.

And this is not an unusual week. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the Paramount/Warner deal and the Live Nation/Ticketmaster settlement further eroded the competitive landscape of the infrastructure that gets creative work to a public. Infrastructure decisions made for commercial entertainment shape what’s possible for nonprofit and independent culture. What’s striking this week is how many such decisions arrived at once, each from a different direction, and each hugely consequential.

Arts leaders have to spend enormous energy on programming, fundraising, audience development, board relations. But what about the infrastructure questions that will ultimately determine whether there’s an audience to develop at all? That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation about where the sector’s attention has historically been trained. But I’d argue there’s a Gold Rush forming right now at the dawn of the AI era for who will control our culture going forward, and unless we want to repeat the mistakes of the Digital Transition 25 years ago, we need to pay attention. We cannot afford to be the “content” in someone else’s “infrastructure” any longer.

Also Worth Your Attention

New Commercial Infrastructure for Dance. The International Dance League launches this spring — arena competitions, team contracts, and what being called “the MMA of dance.” The dance community seems to be reacting with equal parts excitement and wariness. Dance has historically had almost no commercial infrastructure: no leagues, few broadcast deals, no franchise model. Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance were influential when they launched and brought many to dance. But new infrastructure means new money, new audiences, new visibility. It also means new dependencies, new definitions of what the work is for, and new power structures that creators don’t control. The history of every art form that has successfully commercialized — jazz, hip-hop, figure skating — includes both expansion and a shifting of creative control. Another infrastructure story.

The LRB’s Counter-Intuitive Survival Strategy to Literary Profitability. The London Review of Books has lost circulation since the pandemic — down from 91,000 copies to around 78,000. But it’s also grown its revenue at 6.8 percent annually. How’d that happen? The strategy: charge more per reader, refuse to discount for scale, invest in the reader relationship rather than the reach metric. It’s the opposite of the platform logic that dominates traditional publishing. It’s also the opposite of the infrastructure dependency trap. An organization that survives on deep loyalty from a smaller audience is less exposed to platform volatility, algorithmic change, and the whims of distribution systems it doesn’t control. It’s likely not a scalable model for everyone, but for the kinds of institutions the arts world actually runs on — deeply specific, community-rooted, and impossible to fully replicate — it might be more relevant than it looks.

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Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

This week we collected 118 stories. Here’s what I learned:

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died this week at 96. Probably his central insight was what he called the public sphere, that space outside control of both state and market forces where culture circulates freely, ideas get tested, and democratic life lives. It’s not a utopia but a structural condition. Democracy, he argued, required it to exist, and he warned it is never guaranteed.

It’s worth pondering this insight now, because the public sphere is currently being tested: by the market, from inside the institutions that host it, and from the state.

Start with the market, and the digital revolution’s gift to it. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery finalized their merger plans this week, David Ellison promising “a true champion for the creative community.” What he means is scale, one company controlling an enormous portion of our popular entertainment and media culture, including CNN and 15,000 film titles, competing globally against other giants like Netflix and Disney and Apple. The scaling logic has become doctrine since the Silicon Valley model took hold. Grow big or die.

What gets sacrificed in this strategy is the curatorial and editorial function that traditionally lived in the middle of the culture economy. The Big Tech platforms didn’t just change how culture gets distributed, they replaced the public sphere’s function — the editorial judgment, the curation, the deliberation about what matters — with engagement metrics. When monetary value shifts from the content itself to the traffic that that content -- any content -- generates, the public sphere starts to crumble. The algorithm doesn’t host a public sphere, it optimizes attention. These are not the same thing, and the difference is significant.

The nonprofit sector, which was supposed to be the institutional home of the public sphere, protected from both market pressure and state control by its structure, is currently contracting under the weight of that same shift. Pittsburgh’s two largest theatre companies merged this week, Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Civic Light Opera ceasing to exist as themselves. Last year in Seattle, ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company merged into something called Union Arts Center and the 5th Avenue Theatre effectively handed its building to Seattle Theatre Group in an attempt to survive.

These aren’t growth strategies. These are organizations that couldn’t sustain themselves alone, hoping that shared overhead buys enough runway to figure something out. SMU DataArts reports that 44 percent of arts nonprofits ran deficits in 2024, with contributed revenue falling 30 percent and working capital eroding steadily. The public sphere’s institutional infrastructure — regional theatre, presenting organizations, the mid-tier that connects artists to communities — is shrinking. Not because it failed its mission, but because the financial conditions for sustaining that mission are collapsing around it.

And then there is the state. The Trump administration’s Commission of Fine Arts had a busy week: it approved a commemorative coin for the nation’s 250th anniversary featuring the president in a glowering, fists-on-desk pose. It rejected a White House security center as not beautiful enough. And it proposed replacing the White House’s Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian ones favored by the president. A tiny Queens art school received a $2 million NEH grant for its mission to restore the classical style that “last reigned supreme before the Civil War.” And the FCC chair threatened to revoke broadcast licenses if war coverage displeased the president. This is not mere philistinism, it is the state asserting the right to define what culture is for, to capture the public sphere from above, replacing free deliberation with official narrative.

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Habermas’ worry was never that the public sphere would be abolished outright. It was that it would be colonized, gradually taken over by market logic and state power until the space for free deliberation disappeared from the inside, while the institutions nominally hosting it remained standing. Three colonizing forces, operating simultaneously, is new. The digital revolution attacked conditions from the market side over decades. Contraction is attacking from the institutional sustainability side right now. And the state is now attacking from the political side with unusual directness.

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 is a larger, more systemic set of issues that has corroded all of civic life -- from culture to education to journalism to our politics -- and the institutions and structures that nurture it. Indeed, these forces are so much bigger than any one sector, it’s difficult to know where to start in addressing them.

But look around and you will easily find counterfactual evidence. This week, maybe it was Sinners. Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan had a great night at the Oscars — Best actor, supporting actor and screenplay, with a film that is, by every current industry logic, exactly what you are not supposed to make. It has no original IP. No franchise. It’s rooted so specifically in the Mississippi Delta, Black Southern history, and a singular cultural moment that it resists scaling almost by design. Coogler structured the deal to retain ownership and creative control.

The consolidated market didn’t make it possible. The state didn’t fund it. It came from exactly the kind of specific, creator-controlled, uncommercially-minded space that Habermas was trying to describe and defend. As I say -- there are examples everywhere of artists and projects and institutions and communities bucking these forces and creating amazing things that don’t fit current conventional logic.

The public sphere, when it still functions, produces things the market can’t optimize and the state won’t commission. This week, one of those things won everything. The question is: how do we strengthen those things that produce conditions for the work we care about?

Also Worth Your Attention

The AI That’s Already Inside the House. Three stories this week: Hachette pulled the book Shy Girl on both sides of the Atlantic after questions surfaced about AI-generated content — a publisher that either didn’t look hard enough or hoped nobody would notice. Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, sued OpenAI for scraping nearly 100,000 articles to train its models without permission, a lawsuit framed in copyright terms, but whose stakes go further: the dictionary and encyclopedia are the infrastructure of shared meaning, and AI companies built themselves on that infrastructure without paying for it. Lastly, a Scientific American study found that users who wrote with biased AI autocomplete shifted their own expressed views toward the AI’s. The tool seems to be quietly warping judgment from the inside, and that seems to make sense if you think about it. Tools have always come to shape the things we make with them. The threat to creative culture from AI isn’t only the cheap synthetic content flooding the zone, it’s the subtler reshaping of how writers think, what publishers are willing to stand behind, and whose work gets treated as the default source of truth. All three of those are in play simultaneously.

Barnes & Noble Is Having a Moment. Barnes & Noble opened 60 new stores last year and is reportedly preparing for an IPO. The reason is interesting: the chain has been essentially rebuilt from the inside out by its current owner, who pushed authority back to individual stores, let booksellers curate their own shelves, and stopped trying to be Amazon. It became, in short, less everything, more specific and more human. This makeover didn’t coincide with the current AI moment — the turnaround predates it — but it suggests a market truth. The readers who want a book that risks a singular vision want a bookstore that reflects a particular community’s taste rather than an algorithm’s inventory optimization. books as culture rather than commodity. The appeal to cultural specificity seems to be working in publishing retail for the same reason it worked at the Oscars.

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Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters.

In music, a ground bass is a repeating line in the lowest register — stable, unhurried, underneath everything — that gives performers freedom to improvise above it. It doesn’t dictate what you play, but it anchors it, giving shape to the music and making what’s above it possible.

Ireland just built one for artists.

After a three-year pilot that put €325 a week with no strings attached into the hands of 2,000 randomly selected artists, the Irish government made the program permanent. No applications for each project, no justifying your work to a committee, just here’s some money, go make things.

The results were startling. For every euro invested in the program, the Irish economy got €1.39 in return, with nearly €36 million flowing back through taxes. Recipients spent 11 more hours a week on their creative work than a control group, and the percentage of the control group who had stopped working in the arts altogether over the period rose from 6 to 13.5 percent over two years while for Basic Income recipients, the dropouts held steady between 4 and 5.5 percent.

Ireland demonstrated something more about a ground bass: economic insecurity doesn’t just force workers out, it diminishes the overall creative economy. That matters enormously right now, because we are entering a period when a lot of people across a lot of industries are about to lose their job security.

The fear is everywhere right now. Will AI take my job? You hear it across creative industries as the seeming inevitability of AI descends on us. The evidence hasn’t yet caught up to the fear, though. Economists report no measurable sign that AI is putting Americans as a whole out of work. Even Anthropic’s own researchers, who spent months mapping AI’s labor market impact, concluded with a call for prognostication humility, noting that a prominent earlier attempt to identify vulnerable jobs found that most of the categories had maintained healthy employment growth a decade later.

And yet companies are restructuring, using AI as the reason. Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles. Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs, with its CEO saying AI now handles half the company’s work. Block laid off 40% of its workforce. But AI-linked cuts accounted for only about 4.5% of total layoffs in 2025. That hasn’t stopped companies from increasingly using AI as the public explanation for restructuring that might have happened anyway, because it sounds like innovation rather than failure.

History suggests this is familiar territory. Every major technology advance has triggered fear of job loss, then embrace when new unforeseen jobs, even whole new industries emerge because of it. This historical pattern is reassuring, but it may not be the right frame this time.

Previous technology revolutions distributed their gains unevenly but eventually broadly. The factory owner got richer, but the factory needed workers. But AI productivity gains are different. The fear is that the benefits will wildly direct wealth to a handful of companies that own the models, the compute, and the data, impoverishing millions of jobless in the process. A company can replace ten workers with a system costing a fraction of their salaries, and the savings don’t have to get reinvested in wages. The firms that own the intelligence get richer at the rate that everyone else has less work, and that’s not an accident of the technology, it’s the actual business model.

Which brings me back to Ireland’ and to a reframe I think we need’s experiment’s experiment.

The case for some sort of Universal Basic Income has been gaining traction in recent years as technology advances and disparities in wealth grow. How do you maintain some sort of working social contract when the very fundamental pillar of a jobs-based economy shifts and millions of jobs are swept away? But the standard case for UBI frames it as charity: the state compensating people for being economically surplus.

That framing hasn’t won much political traction, and I think misdiagnoses what’s happening. The fundamental currency of value is shifting, from jobs to human activity. Every human who posts a review, searches for something, streams a film, or has a conversation online is producing data. That data trains the AI systems now capturing the productivity dividend -- it’s extremely valuable at scale. So human activity has become the raw material of the new economy, but the humans generating it are currently compensated nothing for it.

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A data dividend, a partial recapture of the value that human existence and behavior generates for AI systems, is a more honest description of what UBI could be. It changes the political and moral architecture of the proposition. You don’t need to prove your work is culturally valuable or economically marginal. You need only to exist and act in the world. (And before your privacy alarms go off: this doesn’t require tracking individuals. It requires taxing the companies that profit from what we collectively generate, more like a carbon levy than a surveillance program. You tax the fuel, not the driver.

And perhaps there’s a way to realign incentives for participation in civic society. You could reward civic participation at a higher rate — volunteering, caregiving, creating, teaching — recognizing that some human activity generates social value the market ignores but a healthier society would want to sustain. Contrast that with the current attention model algorithms that boost outrage, oddity and snark. This would be a ground bass built under contribution rather than employment.

Extend that logic to institutions, and it might be even more interesting.

A symphony orchestra’s audience data, a museum’s visitor engagement patterns, a theater’s ticketing and community relationships — all of this is currently harvested by the platforms those institutions use to reach their audiences. Ticketmaster, Meta, Google sit between cultural institutions and their communities, extract the data from these relationships and monetize it. The institution incurred the expense of creating the event and building the audience, but the platforms captured the value of the connections and its data.

This is what the destruction of cultural middleware looks like at the economic level. The connective tissue between institutions and communities was extracted and redirected, not just eroded. A data dividend framework creates the basis for rebuilding that tissue, not as charity, not as grant-funded infrastructure perpetually vulnerable to budget cycles, but as civic infrastructure with a legitimate revenue claim. This more properly relocates and encourages value where it’s generated.

We don’t fund bridges through philanthropy because we understand they’re important infrastructure for the economy, and because the people who benefit from crossing them ought to contribute to their maintenance. Cultural middleware is similarly load-bearing, but the platforms sitting on top of it have been collecting the toll without maintaining the bridge. A data dividend framework shifts the value proposition to value already extracted, not a request for more grant funding.

For individual artists, a ground bass would reorganize the whole ecosystem. The current arts funding model is structured around scarcity, a pyramid of competitive grants and fellowships where 80 percent or more of applicants fail, and the application process itself is a tax on the time that should go to making work. A ground bass changes the math. You don’t need to win the grant lottery to survive, you need it to thrive. That’s a different relationship to risk, and it shifts who holds power. If artists aren’t economically desperate, they have leverage. They can turn down the bad commission, the exploitive residency, the gig that requires sanding off what’s interesting about their work. Give artists a ground bass and you change who sets the terms.

Ireland started with artists because they were an easy case: chronically underpaid, culturally necessary, structurally abandoned by the market, and the political argument was winnable. But the experiment proves something more general: unconditional income produces more output, not less, generates return and not just expenditure, and retains people in socially valuable work who would otherwise give up.

In AI we are building a productivity machine that will concentrate gains in very few hands. The transition will fall hardest on people with the least flexibility to absorb it, and the current social infrastructure, designed for an employment-based economy, really doesn’t have an answer for what comes next.

The question isn’t whether we can afford a ground bass. Ireland showed it more than pays for itself. The more important question is whether we’re willing to think boldly to reframe the argument: from charity to infrastructure, from grant-seeking to revenue claim, from the arts-as-a-cost to the arts-as-a-civic-asset that has been generating value for platforms and algorithms and shareholders without adequate return to us all.

Ireland started with artists. But the architecture Ireland’s experiment suggests is considerably larger than a pilot program for 2,000 painters and poets.

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