This week’s AJ highlights: Wynton Marsalis has announced his retirement from Jazz at Lincoln Center after a 40-year tenure that essentially defined the organization. The Kennedy Center’s administrative situation has descended into farce: its newly hired VP of artistic programming, Kevin Couch, resigned after just two weeks while Sarah Kramer, a senior director who rose through the ranks over a decade, was abruptly fired. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s decision to lay off 6% of its workforce to address an “unsustainable deficit” and the Washington Post’s “existential meltdown” are departures at a more industrial scale.
There’s a growing “Resistance of the Analog” hardening into a defense against synthetic culture. Yale professors are increasingly banning screens and requiring students to read on paper to force a direct, unmediated encounter with texts that AI cannot replicate. This is justified by the week’s technology news: while advancing AI can beat the “average” human on creativity tests, it still fails to reach the level of “radical” human innovation and judgment. This defense is also taking place in the courts, with major music publishers seeking $3 billion in damages from Anthropic for the alleged mass-theft of song lyrics.
Finally, we are seeing the rise of a Keep it Human strategy. To keep audiences from disappearing into their screens, the Palo Alto Players has begun offering free childcare to lower the barriers to attending the theater. Mixing cultures, Detroit Opera is welcoming Parliament-Funkadelic for a full symphonic collaboration. And Bob Ross to the rescue: public media is being financially buoyed by the “happy little trees” of Bob Ross, whose paintings are now fetching nearly $800,000 at auction.
From Cambodian immigrants in Maine finding solace in traditional dance as ICE descends, to a Minneapolis bookshop going viral for resisting federal agents, it’s been an eventful week.
All of this week’s stories below
