Some good news stories from the past week: Audiences keep arriving. Gen Z’s share of the movie box office has climbed from 34% to 39% since 2019 (Star-Tribune). London’s Natural History Museum logged a record 7.1 million visitors last year — surpassing the British Museum for the first time (The Standard). Barnes & Noble opened 60 stores and is reportedly eyeing an IPO (The Atlantic). Demand for culture is growing, even as the financial models that have traditionally supported institutions are under stress. It’s important to remember this.
Running alongside all of this: a strange week in aesthetics-as-policy. The Trump administration’s Commission of Fine Arts approved a 250th-anniversary coin featuring a glowering president, rejected the White House visitor center as insufficiently beautiful, and the NEH quietly handed $2 million — roughly its grantee’s entire annual budget — to a tiny Queens art school devoted to restoring pre-Civil War classical styles, bypassing the normal competitive process (New York Times). Across the Atlantic, Britain’s government offered the BBC its first-ever permanent charter and reversed course on AI copyright after a campaign by Elton John and Paul McCartney (The Guardian).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
