Today’s AJ highlights: Phrase of the day is “Justification Impulse”—the persistent demand that art prove its utility for democracy, ecology, or the economy—even as its role as a basic survival mechanism becomes existential.
First, a call from the New England Foundation for the Arts to stop justifying the arts and simply acknowledge that “Art is Water”. This inherent necessity is given a haunting reality by a survivor’s account of how Bach’s Chaconne served as the key to surviving childhood abuse—a form of “pure escape” that dry facts or policy papers cannot quantify. Yet, the pressure to make art “sing” for a cause remains; scientists and artists are finding that emotional storytelling is far more effective at cutting through “ecofatigue” than dry data.
As we debate art’s value, the technology is tightening its grasp. Discord is now requiring biometric details for age verification, a move that forces users to weigh access against a history of vendor data breaches. Meanwhile, Spotify is attempting to bridge the analog-digital divide with “Page Match,” a tool that scans physical pages to sync with audiobooks—another step in the seamless disaggregation of the physical object.
The Justice Department is probing Netflix for anticompetitive practices amid a merger probe. In the media world, as The Atlantic laments the “dying ecosystem” of book reviews and newspapers, Minnesota Public Radio has seen its web traffic soar to become the #1 local public radio outlet in the country, proving that hyper-local crisis coverage still commands an audience .
Finally, we look at craft and tradition. While Claire Tabouret navigates the “un-French” challenge of creating figurative stained glass for Notre Dame, AI is now being used to debunk old masters in Turin and Philadelphia, revealing they are likely “studio” works rather than originals by Van Eyck.
All of today’s stories are below.
