The Great Renegotiation: Five Ideas about where Culture is going in 2026

My last post trying to make sense of the landscape in arts and culture in 2025 was something of an autopsy of the year that traditional 20th business models for culture finally broke. Now I’d like to propose a blueprint for rebuilding. Yes, I mean rebuild and not recovery. You recover from a bad season; you don’t recover from a climate shift. You adapt.

To do that, I’d like to step back a bit and frame this through a fundamental concept that has anchored creative work for about three centuries. For three hundred years the arts economy was built on a simple idea called copyright. I make a thing, I own the thing, and I sell you a copy or a license of the thing or a piece of it. The scarcity of the copy guaranteed the value of the labor, skill and talent it took to produce it.

In 2025, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we finally had to admit that deal is dead. We just haven’t held the funeral yet.

Generative AI has demonstrated that “style,” “vibe,” and “competence” can be detached from the human creator and replicated at pretty much zero marginal cost. Our current laws never anticipated this. Copyright protects the specific expression (this exact recording of a symphony, for example), but it does not protect the essence (the ability to generate infinite symphonies that sound like it).

So, where does that leave the traditional arts—the orchestras, musicians, museums, artists, theaters, actors, dancers, designers and writers?

We can deny this simple reality and go to the mat in trying to defend a concept/principle/law that has been superseded by technology’s ability to subvert it (and history shows this is inevitable). Or we can step back and rethink. Anticipate and regroup. Besides, copyright hasn’t served us terribly well in protecting our interests for a long time, so let’s figure out something better that does.

We’re entering a brutal period of Price Discovery. If a machine can write a “good enough” program note, produce a “good enough” image, or compose a “good enough” score, what is the human version worth? (I refer you to the advent of YouTube when shaky cameras, bad lighting and terrible sound beat highly polished professional video. Or the cell phone, which became ubiquitous despite its vastly inferior call quality and tendency to drop calls). Audience values always change when technology makes something new possible.

For the traditional arts, I think 2026 might be our “organic food” moment. In the 20th century, industrial farming made calories cheap, abundant, and flavorless. In reaction, more and more of us woke up to the lack of nutrition and suddenly, “organic” wasn’t just a label; it became a premium asset class and a large sector of the market.

The “slow food” movement might be even more apt. Fast food became ubiquitous in the 20th Century, but a Slow Food army built itself on healthy organic food, its provenance and the culture built around growing, preparing and consuming it.

In 2026, we need to begin purposely to define, label, and establish the value of “Organic Culture.” In the pushback to AI, many have proposed schemes requiring the labeling of AI in creative work. I think we need to do the opposite: label and brand what is the higher-value, premium organic, just as we do for food.

Here are where I think the five battlegrounds are where these negotiations will happen.

1. Your Archives. Your Provenance. Your “Clean Fuel.”

For decades, orchestras, ballets, and museums have treated their archives as historical dustbins—marketing curiosities at best. For years they were locked away from view. Then, when we finally made them accessible, we dumped them into the world –digital galleries, troves of historic recordings– without context or narrative.

In 2026, your archive is the most valuable asset you own. Why? Because it is “Provenanced Data.”

AI giants are currently choking on their own exhaust (“model collapse” as their models increasingly train on “synthetic data”) and facing a tidal wave of lawsuits for scraping data they didn’t ask permission to use. They are starving for “clean,” high-quality, human-tagged, legally clear datasets.

Orchestras shouldn’t just be dumping their catalogs on streaming platforms for fractions of pennies. They should be ring-fencing their unique artistic identities as a closed-loop dataset. The struggle for 2026 is a strategic choice: Do we sell our history to the machines to keep the lights on? Or do we create “Sanctuary Archives” that are explicitly human-only? There’s no right answer here. One orchestra might choose to have its legacy stay “human only.” Another might decide to license its “essence” as a basis for new generations of creative work.

The point is, your history is really valuable. Don’t just give it away for pennies. The era of giving our data away for “exposure” has to end. The archive is no longer a graveyard; it’s a gold mine.

2. The “Proof of Work” Premium

If the result is free, you have to charge for the struggle.

Audiences used to pay for “The Show.” Now, “The Show” is everywhere. All around us wherever we go. Content is no longer a scarce resource. We barely have to click to access it. Indeed, it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by it. So you simply creating more content is going to have an increasingly difficult time struggling for attention. So what’s valuable? What will people pay attention to? I think the value proposition for live performance shifts from Perfection to Vulnerability.

In our traditional art forms, the skill and talent it takes to create something is astonishing. Rare. But maybe not so rare anymore when measured against everything else in the world vying for attention. I think the real fascination of live performance is the precariousness of it–all the forces that have to come together to create it in a moment.

And now we are starting to see the rise of the “Acoustic Counter-Revolution.” As AI video and audio become indistinguishable from reality, the “Authenticity Premium” for unamplified, hazardous performance skyrockets. We need to sell the sweat. The fact that the soprano might crack the high C is exactly why she is valuable. If she were an AI, she wouldn’t crack, and she would be worthless.

There’s something else — when an artist makes it seem too easy, routine, it becomes less interesting. Indifference because you can do something “perfectly” even if it’s astonishing, isn’t so compelling. An essential part of the human experience is struggle and failing and picking yourself up and figuring it out and making it work. That’s what is authentically human. What we can relate to.

We need to redefine the value in selling “Excellence” (which is now a commodity) and start selling “Proof of Work” (which is a core organic value).

3. The Shift from “Rental” to “Remix”

There’s a reason every Big Brand has gone all in on storytelling. Telling stories gives people ways into your brand. It’s no longer sufficient to throw something out into a marketplace, on a stage or in the gallery and expect it to resonate just because it’s good.

The visual arts are hitting a hard wall regarding logistics. The era of the “Blockbuster”—shipping 80 Van Goghs across the ocean in climate-controlled crates—broke in 2025 under the weight of insurance spikes and climate guilt. The museum shift in 2026 pivots from Logistics to better Storytelling.

We are seeing the end of the museum as a Store House or Shipping Depot and the return as an Editorial House. We need to move from “Importing Value” (renting a famous show) to “Generating Context” (brilliant curators with highly creative takes). It is cheaper, it is greener, and it forces the institution to have an actual point of view rather than just a budget for air freight.

And then we need to find ways of speaking to visitors personally, based on their curiosity, experience and interests. I explored this idea more fully in an earlier post here.

4. The “Consent Rider”

This is the new labor battle. Traditional contracts were about royalties (getting paid for what you did). The new contracts are about Generative Potential (getting paid for what you could do).

Now we need to think about talent and performance in an expanded way. This would be the rise of the “Consent Rider.” Every contract signed—from guest conductor to scenic designer—should answer a new question: Who owns the training data generated by this collaboration, this production?

If a theater designs a groundbreaking set, does the set designer own the “style model” or “essence” of that set (as opposed to the actual designs themselves)? Can the theater use that model to generate marketing assets next season without hiring the designer again? Similarly, any collaborative art that creates a distinctive product needs to consider the value of derivatives or new work “in the style of”…

We are moving from owning the object to owning/licensing the ghost or essence. If we don’t start writing these rules into contracts now, the default answer from the tech sector will be: “We own everything.”

And sorry to say–if we follow history and get mired down in protections that are so restrictive that nobody can do anything (see labor negotiations over rights in the digital era of the past 30 years), we all miss out on growing a new ecosystem and lose out in thinking creatively about how to innovate and try things. The current ecosystem has failed to adapt to technology because of rampant distrust and a mindset that has failed to anticipate and evolve. The default has been to protect rather than expand. I’ll have much more to say about this in a future post.

5. Radical Hospitality (Generosity as a Business Model)

Finally, if content is everywhere, Belonging becomes the must-have luxury good.

The “Barbell Economy” suggests that the middle is dead. You are either a global content brand (The Met, Netflix) or a hyper-local community hub. At least for now, the middle is unsustainable and there is little middle ground.

For the traditional arts in 2026, a live performance is an excuse. We can get perfect performances on recordings or video. The ordinary is the stream of books, music, images we see and hear constantly as we travel through the world with our phones or sit at home on our couches. The Gathering is the new scarce product. I think we will see a shift toward “Radical Hospitality”—where the lobby, the bar, and the pre- and post-show discussion are not afterthoughts, but the primary value drivers. We are getting together around a shared interest, a celebrated value. So the question becomes–how do we lean in to those values and celebrate those who share them?

We are competing with the couch. The couch offers better content, cheaper food, and no parking fees. The only thing the couch cannot offer is the physical presence of other human beings. The organizations that thrive in 2026 will be the ones that tweak their experiences to maximize human friction.

The Bottom Line

Big Tech thinks culture is just Output—or in their words, that catch-all word “content”–that is simply a means of driving clicks and attention that they can monetize. The “traditional arts” know that culture is really a Process, a ritual to be experienced.

The struggle of 2026 is to convince the world that the process is the thing worth paying for. So we are no longer in the business of selling copyright. We are in the business of selling humanity. Ideas. Experiences.