This week’s AJ highlights: One of the most visceral blows to our cultural ecosystem is the continuing hollowing out of legacy media expertise. The Washington Post has laid off its entire photography staff and Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee, a retreat from curated record-keeping that leaves the nation’s capital with fewer professional observers. The media contraction is a national trend, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has simultaneously cut 15% of its staff, targeting nearly half of those cuts in the newsroom.
But there is also good news. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has secured a dedicated $10 million endowment for its artistic director position, a signal of private faith in the company. This institutional strength is mirrored on Broadway, where the jukebox musical & Juliet has defied the post-pandemic slump to become one of only four new musicals to fully recoup its investment—proving that sophisticated pop-theatricality still has a viable economic engine.
While a legal battle erupts in Philadelphia over the removal of a memorial to the enslaved people of George Washington’s household—an act of erasure many view as a direct attack on historical honesty—the judiciary is increasingly pushing back. Judge Fred Biery’s recent ruling is being celebrated as a “passionate, erudite, and mischievous” piece of writing that marshals literature and history to defend civil liberties against executive power.
And further good news. From the launch of the massive new Los Angeles Jazz Festival—hoping to draw 250,000 fans to a city recognizing its own musicians—to the surge of “Resistance Theater” rising across the country, the week’s stories suggest that our artists are resilient.
Lastly, my observation that the shuttering of the Kennedy Center and the decimation of the Washington Post are neither isolated nor unrelated happenings. They represent a break in the connective tissue that used to unite Americans. This is part of a larger systemic uncoupling of our civic, political and cultural institutions from the engine that sustains civic life. My theory: Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra on Diacritical.
All of this week’s stories below.
