From 30,000 Feet: Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025

Over the past few weeks on ArtsJournal we’ve been showcasing year-end reviews of highlights (and low-lights) of a turbulent year in culture. But when you spend every morning scanning websites, blogs, and newspapers for what to put in our daily ArtsJournal report, you aren’t just scanning for news; you’re monitoring a seismograph. Most days, it’s background noise—a hiring here, a firing there, a press release about a “groundbreaking” immersive experience or life-changing new work.

The bigger challenge is to zoom out and find the signals for how culture is evolving. Most years these signals point to something about funding, how technology or social media is changing consumption habits, or how the artistic conversation is leading or following the broader culture. But if you watched the needle in 2025, you saw something different. You saw what looks to be some of our long-established cultural structures crack and start to give way.

We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025–powered by human editor curation, not algorithms or AI. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a structural shift.

There’s a case to be made that 2025 was the year that 20th-century models for culture finally broke. The “middle” is essentially gone. We are living in a barbell economy: massive, fortified institutions on one end, scrappy, zero-budget guerillas on the other, and a gaping hole where the rest of the culture used to be.

Here are five structural shifts that defined the year:

1. A Flood of Synthetic Creativity–Who owns What?

If in 2024 AI was a novelty, in 2025, it became… ubiquitous? Obsessively overhyped? Perhaps calling it an environmental hazard is more accurate.

There’s a reason the word of the year wasn’t “AI” it was “Slop.” We watched as our creative ecosystems were overwhelmed with synthetic content—improbable imagery, emotionally sterile video and hallucinated text, pumped up by AI-directed algorithmic noise. This forced a fascinating philosophical confrontation: What is the value of human friction — both in the making and in the consumption.

We tracked the legal battles, the artists vs. scrapers, the “Right to Create” and copyright lawsuits, but the deeper story was the existential challenge to what defines creative ownership. For the first time in history, the style of an artist, the artist’s “essence,” became a commodity distinct from the artist themselves. When we saw stories about “Studio Ghiblify” filters or dead actors being resurrected for cameos, the debates shifted from “Is this legal?” to “Who owns the ghost?”

The backlash is just as interesting. The flood of what passes for synthetic perfection triggered hunger for the flawed and the physical. It’s not a coincidence that we saw a surge in “hyper-tactile” art forms (ceramics, fiber, live performance) this year. It could be that in a world overrun by infinite, generic digital supply, what retains value is the thing that doesn’t scale, that isn’t perfect. Will synthetic art ultimately make analog human creativity more valuable or less? Historically, 2025 will be notable for raising new existential questions about what is art and who is an artist and–just as important–to what extent this matters.

2. The Collapse of the Culture Business Model

For decades, we’ve talked about the fragility of the arts business model, both non-profit and commercial. This year, it seems that the math really did stop mathing.

Inflation drove the cost of production (labor, insurance, materials) to unsustainable highs—Baumol’s Cost Disease on steroids. At the same time, the philanthropic safety net continued to unravel. Government funding got a bit screwy. Donor fatigue set in, corporate sponsorship retreated from controversy, and foundation priorities continued their shift away from general operating support.

The result has been the collapse of the “middle class.” Our headlines were dominated by the closure of mid-sized institutions—regional theaters, city museums, independent galleries like Marlborough and JTT. These organizations were too big to be scrappy and too poor to be endowed. They simply ran out of runway.

What became clear in 2025 is that the “growth” era for institutions is largely over. The assumption that institutions should always get bigger, build new wings, and expand programming has hit the wall of economic reality. We are now in the era of contraction and consolidation.

3. The Cultures Wars get Concrete

The business news was grim but the political news was obsessively kinetic. The “Culture Wars” went from tedious metaphor to official policy platform.

With the return of Trump, the “hands-off” tradition of government arts policy has been abandoned, at least for now. There was a barrage of direct, muscular attacks on our institutions of culture. The DEI reckoning was the most visible front. Under threats of lawsuits and executive orders targeting “divisive concepts,” institutions scrambled to scrub their language. We watched “equity” disappear from mission statements, replaced by lawyer-approved synonyms. The pivots produced whiplash. Was it abandonment of values, cold hard pragmatism, or simple survival to fight another day? Across the broader culture we’ve seen too many of our institutions– big law firms, universities, Big Tech, Congress — capitulate. Our culture institutions for the most part seemed to offer… quieter resistance.

But it went deeper than vocabulary. The Kennedy Center controversy—where the board’s addition of the Trump name triggered cancellations and legal threats—was a bellwether. It signaled that the era of the “neutral” arts institution may be dead. Government is no longer a passive funder (and barely that, given the “R.I.P. NEH” headlines); it is now an active ideological participant in a different way than it has been in the past. The message sent to boards and directors this year was stark: Get in line or get defunded.

4. The Great Disconnect

While institutions were fighting for survival, the audience was quietly moving on. The disconnect between how art is sold and why people want to buy it became a chasm this year. The institutional subscription model—the financial bedrock of the performing arts for 60 years—is effectively dead. The “Subscription Apocalypse” was confirmed this year as audiences trained by the on-demand economy refused to commit to tickets six months in advance. “Subscription” in the new lexicon is about having what you want when you want it (more or less the Netflix model) rather than appointment commitments.

It’s not just about tickets; it’s about mood. Our streaming algorithms filter out challenging content, catering to what we’ve already shown interest in. While many arts institutions continue to program “challenging,” high-concept work, audience data points toward a massive flight to comfort. We saw the rise of nostalgia as the dominant cultural currency—from the “Sad Art Dad” cinema trend to an obsession with retro-aesthetics.

In our always-on, attention-hungry media environment, people are exhausted. If they’re willing to even look up from the endless scroll on their screens, they seem to be looking for art that heals, affirms, or distracts. Institutions that insisted on “educating” their audiences or lecturing to them this year often found themselves playing to empty rooms. The audience has changed the terms of engagement, and the sector is still playing catch-up. Which poses an important question: if algorithmically-driven comfort food is the common language, what happens to art that seeks to demand more? The answer may be that it increasingly goes unfound.

5. The Consolidation Trap

Finally, we have to talk about the pipeline. The way culture is produced, distributed and discussed is being strangled by consolidation. In 2025, the “local” voice effectively vanished from the media landscape. As legacy media collapsed or cut their culture desks, critical voices retreated to the corners, to the national entities or the “Substack economy.”

Maybe this sounds like an “inside baseball” media story, but it has profound implications for what art gets made. Without local critical discourse to champion mid-sized work in Cleveland or Seattle, there is no ladder to national traction. A show either becomes a massive, viral, global hit (usually owned by a conglomerate), or it happens in a vacuum, immediately forgotten. And we now live in a time when even an entertainment behemoth like Disney may be too small to compete at scale. This year saw the effective end of the 20th Century TV network, and cable TV continues its steep decline. Disney’s OpenAI deal gave a revealing hint of what might be the creative landscape to come, and it doesn’t bode well for independents.

We are seeing the “Netflix-ification” of everything: a hollowed-out middle where only the biggest IP viably survives. Independent producers, mid-list authors, and regional playwrights are fast losing the infrastructure that used to sustain them. Something will inevitably take form to support a new system. We just don’t know yet what it will be.

The Bottom Line

If there is a throughline to 2025, it may be fragility and uncertainty. The systems we built for culture in the 20th century all seem to be buckling at the same time while a viable 21st Century infrastructure hasn’t yet taken form. We seem to be at the fulcrum point between two eras–shifting plates grinding against one another with little apparent safe ground.

I don’t mean for this to be so bleak-sounding. There are many many reasons to celebrate culture this year. But those plates won’t stop moving, and we should at least be aware of the macro environment in which we work. The good news is that the world is still full of astonishing creativity and artists. For all the of the challenges of recent years, creativity seems still to be flourishing. Happy New Year.