AJ Chronicles: The Metropolitan Opera as Poster Child

The Metropolitan Opera announced its 2026–27 season this week, and the headline takeaway is this: 17 productions. The fewest in a full season since the company moved into Lincoln Center in 1966. More than a third of all performances will be Aida, La Bohème, or Tosca. Peter Gelb, whose long tenure has been marked by entrepreneurial ambition and significant financial struggle, simultaneously announced he’ll depart in 2030.

The Met announcement is Exhibit A for what it looks like when a culture’s Middleware is in process of collapse.

Mid-to-large civic cultural institutions — the opera company, the symphony, the major museum — were positioned throughout the 20th century as the connective tissue between artistic ambition and broad public life. These institutions weren’t just concert halls or performing arts centers or galleries, they were the organizing structures through which communities understood themselves as having ambitions of a cultural life. The “center” in this sense isn’t geographic, it’s an institutional, civic, symbol. We could add sports arenas and stadiums to the list as well.

What this week’s news aggregated across a dozen sectors is evidence of is that the center is contracting; not yet collapsing, but pulling inward, reducing its scope and scale, operating defensively. Consider: Melbourne’s state arts funding has fallen more than 25% since 2022, prompting one arts leader to warn the city risks going from cultural capital to the least-funded major city in Australia. Pennsylvania’s arts council didn’t just cut — it rebranded itself as “Pennsylvania Creative Industries,” reorienting its grant guidelines toward economic development. The message to arts organizations was unmistakable: justify yourself in terms we can sell to the legislature. Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster and one of the world’s most respected cultural voices, announced it will eliminate its Greek broadcasts and scale back in multiple other languages after losing millions in federal subsidies. These scattered events in just one week reinforce a pattern that has been building for months.

The forces doing the contracting aren’t all the same, and that’s what makes the pattern so instructive. Some are financial: post-pandemic deficits, inflation in labor costs, slower-than-expected audience recovery. Some are political: the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting cultural content it disfavors, which this week produced both a court-ordered restoration of the Philadelphia slavery exhibition and ongoing anxiety at the Kennedy Center, where a small Canadian circus troupe had to make a public accounting of why it decided not to cancel its dates. And some are structural: the audience fragmentation that streaming and algorithmic distribution have accelerated, which pulls attention away from the kind of sustained institution-building that major cultural organizations require.

The networkization of culture and away from institutions has been going on over the past 30 years, devolving to a much broader range of voices. A democratization of culture, we called it. And it’s difficult to argue that the cultural diversity it has wrought has been bad. But it has also eaten away at the connective tissue of our civic culture and impoverished civic life and leadership.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: when the center contracts, it doesn’t just produce smaller seasons and lower budgets, it weakens legitimacy. The Met doing 17 productions instead of 25 isn’t just a production count, it’s a statement about what kind of institution the Met is redefining itself to be. Retreating to Aida, Bohème, and Tosca isn’t just a temporary retreat, it defensively impoverishes what the Met aspires to be. That redefinition has enormous consequences downstream because the mid-size regional companies, the emerging companies, the adventurous collectives, are all watching and calculating their own risks partly from what the anchor institutions signal is possible.

The Pennsylvania rebranding is perversely more revealing than the Melbourne funding cuts. At least Melbourne’s politicians are just cutting; they’re not asking arts organizations to change their identities in exchange for money. Pennsylvania is doing something subtler. It’s telling the arts sector that it will receive public support if it agrees to redefine its value in economic development terms. That’s not just a budget adjustment, it’s a philosophical ultimatum. And arts organizations are right to be alarmed. Not because economic development is an unworthy goal, but because accepting that economic frame wholesale means conceding an argument about what culture is for.

So what should the arts sector do with this? A few things seem clear.

First is to resist the false binary between contraction and collapse. A smaller Met season that is artistically bold is better than a larger one that is merely adequate. The question isn’t scale, it’s coherence. If the story you’re telling is “we are surviving,” you will eventually be proven wrong. If the story is “we are essential to something specific,” you have a chance.

Second, watch the funding frame closely. Pennsylvania’s shift to “creative industries” language could be a harbinger, not an outlier. The pressure to justify cultural investment in economic terms will increase as arts support becomes more contested. Organizations that can articulate both the economic case and the civic case without collapsing one into the other will be better positioned than those who capitulate entirely to either frame.

Third, pay attention to what consolidation suggests. California’s classical radio stations unified under a single “Classical California” brand this week, a move that makes operational sense but also signals something about scale and sustainability in public media. Elsewhere, Neon, one of indie film’s most successful recent studios, is in talks to sell a significant stake. These aren’t failures, they’re adaptations, and they echo a longtime strategy in the commercial media and technology industries to scale to compete. But they suggest that the organizational form of many cultural institutions built for the economy of a different era may need to evolve faster than most boards and executives are comfortable with.

I continue to think that the flamboyant destruction of our civic and political institutions over the past year has put a focus on the value of institutions we haven’t seen in a very very long time. Our current dysfunction will put pressure on finding solutions and — I hope I’m not being too much of a Pollyanna here — seeing the need for reinvesting in civic institutions that make us prosperous.

Also Worth Your Attention This Week

Hollywood’s Identity Problem: A viral AI-generated video depicting Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt sent Hollywood unions SAG-AFTRA into high alert this week. The story is being covered mostly as a labor story, which it is. But the deeper issue is identity: whose likeness, whose performance, whose creative provenance is at the heart of a piece of work? This is a great example of the attribution and accountability crisis I’ve been writing about that is central to the challenge of AI. The industry doesn’t have a framework for this yet. Neither does the law. Organizations that work with artists’ identities, which is to say, most cultural organizations, should be building their own policies now (and adding clauses to their contracts, before a court case forces the question.

What culture actually does when the institutions are gone. Then there’s Afghanistan, where a clandestine circle of women is meeting weekly to read Orwell and Hemingway, defying a Taliban ban on women’s education that also saw hundreds of musical instruments burned in a public pyre this week. It would be easy to file these stories under “human interest” but they are a reminder of what culture is before it becomes an institution: it is the thing people do at extreme personal risk because it is essentially human. The center might shrink but what it protects won’t.