This Week’s Highlights:
Arts institutions are shedding leaders without apparent ideas about what they want next. The Boston Globe asked the week’s sharpest question about the BSO’s firing of Andris Nelsons — not “what’s the vision?” but “does the vision even exist?” (Boston Globe). The Czech culture minister fired the director of the Prague National Gallery in what critics called a political purge (ARTnews). And Hyperallergic‘s verdict on the Whitney Biennial: it’s hiding from the world rather than reflecting on it (Hyperallergic).
The daily conversation about AI ran toward the existential this week — what it does to meaning, whether you’re coal or a horse, whether any ethical path exists at all. But underneath that, quietly and with less drama, the commercial infrastructure of the AI creative economy spent the week catching fire. OpenAI shut down Sora — three months after Disney had staked a major deal on it (Variety). Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica both sued OpenAI, charging not just training-data theft but real-time reproduction of their content (Press Gazette). The Supreme Court unanimously freed internet providers from liability for music piracy by their users (The Hollywood Reporter). And at the Game Developers Conference, developers said they’re using AI for plenty of things — just not for making games (The Verge). In this week’s AJ Chronicles “deeper dive,” I argue that tech infrastructure is actually the arts story of the year because of the ways it will reshape every element of our cultural infrastructure.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
