This Week’s Highlights:
The economic logic that built our cultural institutions showed distress this week, and the pieces are reorganizing. CBS announced it will earn $15 million a year by leasing Colbert’s Late Night slot rather than producing anything in it (Variety) — a network ditching its highest-watched late night show and deciding it would rather collect rent than make television. NPR laid off journalists while restructuring around an uncertain federal future (NPR). And it was revealed that Hollywood executive pay rose 51 this past year while the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap).
The institutions gaining ground seem to be the ones rewriting the model entirely. London’s Wigmore Hall reports record sales since walking away from Arts Council England funding (The Stage). Opera Philadelphia, eighteen months from collapse a year and a half ago, now runs a surplus on $11 tickets (The New York Times). Sydney Dance Company is closing four years of deficits by hosting Pilates classes (Australian Financial Review). And the Heinz Endowments are exiting individual artist grants to fund cultural infrastructure (WESA).
Above all of it, AI keeps flattening the field — a study reported that on the basis of reviewing hundreds of thousands of college essays assisted by AI that they converge into homogenized sameness (The New York Times). And the observation that non-fiction book publishers are caught completely unprepared for what’s already arriving in the AI era (New York Magazine). The question facing every cultural organization right now isn’t how to defend the existing model, it’s defining what comes next.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
Doug
