AJ Chronicles: This Week’s Stories — Changing of the Guard

This week there’s a question that connects nearly every story. Who gets to decide what’s real?

A viral AI-generated video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt is racking up views. Neither actor consented or was paid. SAG-AFTRA is furious. Lawsuits await. Meanwhile, Tracey Emin is telling young artists to buy cameras, keep diaries, and send letters because everything on your phone already belongs to someone else. Here are two responses separated by a generational gulf: one legalistic, the other almost monastic. Neither is really wrong, but both would benefit from better understanding of the underlying direction things are going.

The deeper pattern this week isn’t really about AI. It’s about the collapse of systems we relied on to distinguish signal from noise. An essay in Aeon frames it through game theory: institutions scale trust beyond personal relationships, but they themselves require trustworthy people to operate. So who guards the guardians? Historically, the answer was reputation — communities holding institutions accountable through observation and memory. But that mechanism has been breaking down across the cultural landscape, and the wreckage is everywhere.

The zombie internet, Fast Company reports, is what happens when AI-generated content overwhelms the human web. Google’s AI Overviews, Wired reports, aren’t just hallucinating, they’re generating fake phone numbers that route callers to scammers. The guardian of our information has become the enabler of its corruption. Talk about hallucinations.

But back to institutional cultural guardianship. The Atlantic asks whether the Mellon Foundation is the last hope for American arts and letters or is inadvertently killing them by virtue of its consolidated funding power. PEN America, nearly destroyed by its fractures over Gaza, names new leaders calling the threats to free expression “existential.” The Artforum editor who succeeded the one fired over a Palestinian liberation letter has herself stepped down now long after she was appointed. Then there’s London’s National Gallery facing an $11.1 million deficit. And The Louvre, which discovered a decade-long ticket fraud scheme. Are these isolated crises? I’d suggest they’re symptoms of institutions that have lost the connective tissue between their missions and their publics.

But here’s something interesting: the creative responses emerging from the various breakdowns of institutional authority. In Minneapolis, theater artists are staging performances in clandestine locations because artists and audiences are afraid to gather during the ICE surge. Indie bookstores in Minnesota report two kinds of demand — books to understand what’s happening and books to escape it.

What connects these? Each is an act of cultural self-authorization — people deciding for themselves what matters, who performs, where art happens. They’re not waiting for institutional permission. They’re building authority from the ground up.

The question is what the new structures of trust look like when they emerge. Right now, the most interesting green shoots look small, local, defiant, and stubbornly human. Which may be exactly the right scale for rebuilding.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world.