As you’ve noticed, we’ve been adding some features to AJ, including these introductions to our newsletters. Today we debut a weekly short essay in which I take a look at the week’s stories and tie them to longer term cultural trends and analysis. Check it out and subscribe to the weekly essay if you want to see more. It’s my attempt to make sense out of the thousands of stories we look at each week. And let me know what you think at artsbeat@artsjournal.com
This week’s AJ highlights: We are witnessing a profound friction between federal protection and local ideological purging. In a significant act of institutional defiance, the U.S. House voted to fully fund the NEA, NEH, and the Smithsonian, bucking explicit executive threats to their budgets (Hyperallergic ). Yet, at the ground level, the “cleansing” of culture is accelerating: a Texas university removed Plato’s Symposium from its syllabus to comply with new state policies on gender and race ideology (The Atlantic ), while the Pentagon ordered editorial changes at Stars and Stripes to eliminate what it termed “woke distractions” (AP ).
Technology has moved from a tool of assistance to a site of active resistance. The digital audio space has become a primary battlefield, with Spotify banning a #1 song in Sweden after discovering the artist was a digital phantom (BBC ). This pushback is becoming systemic, as Bandcamp officially prohibited AI-generated music to protect the “human connection” of art (Engadget ), and Matthew McConaughey became the first major actor to trademark his own likeness to fend off AI exploitation (BBC ).
And we are reckoning with a foundational shift in cultural literacy and institutional stability. Educators are sounding alarms as Gen Z arrives at college unable to read full-length books, a crisis of attention that is forcing institutions to lower academic standards (Fortune (MSN) ). This erosion of deep engagement is mirrored by the collapse of traditional cultural infrastructure: the Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled entirely following a mass author boycott (The Guardian ), the Washington National Opera is leaving the Kennedy Center (The New York Times ), and the California College of the Arts is shuttering after 116 years (Artnet ).
All our stories from the week are below.
