This Week’s AJ Chronicles: Context is Survival

This week we collected 119 stories. Here’s what I learned:

Existential crises have a way of forcing clarity. Whether the arts and the larger creative world are in crisis I leave for you to decide. But with weekly news of financial and organizational meltdowns, political pressures and an almost primordial angst about threats of AI, some things may be becoming clearer about what matters and/or what works.

Emma Riva’s story this week in The Art Newspaper about museum wall texts frames an idea bigger than writing on the walls. She writes: “Debates in the art world over how much wall text museums should provide are underlaid with the question: Is art meant to be understood, put into context? Or is it felt, wordlessly?” She goes on to describe arguments for guiding a viewer (perhaps improperly) versus letting the visitor approach art with only their own experience. If art is any good at what it does, does it require context?

I’d suggest that context is everything, guided or not. But it isn’t about more information; as I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s finding ways to meet audiences where they are and bring them to where you want them to be.

I think we are witnessing a structural shift in how we define human value – the value of human context versus the smothering synthetic data of AI. This story from the Yale News reports that faculty at Yale are increasingly banning screens to force a “direct, unmediated encounter” with text. When AI can instantly synthesize a summary or mimic styles, the physical book is being re-deployed to focus how students learn. It’s an attempt to encourage the mental context required for “deep reading” that many believe (backed by studies) can’t be found in screens.

Provenanced data—rooted in a specific human context—may be the only thing that can distinguish human art from the statistically-likely but often soulless outputs of machines. AI can mimic competence, but perversely, for all its prowess, AI might be proving the uniqueness of human creativity.” It utterly fails to replicate the lived human experience required for true memoir. Again context.

This week major music companies sued Anthropic for $3 billion accusing the company of the unauthorized “mining” of 20,000 songs. The recording industry is realizing that their back-catalogs are no longer just product; they are the training fuel for their own obsolescence. Also this week, it came to light that Anthropic had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed knowledge into its AI models. Even if you’re a fan of AI, it’s hard not to have a visceral reaction to the news.

A trend may be emerging: are we moving away from a world of “content” back to a world of “context?” Whether it’s a theater company offering free childcare to attract audiences or arguments for the need for new spaces in cities that counteract digital sensory overload, the idea in 2026 may be the preservation of contextually-located human experience. Great magazines have understood this for a long time. It is brilliant editors who defined the New Yorker Magazine story as a distinct genre built in context of the stories around them.

In contemporary culture, context is no longer a luxury—it may be what keeps the machine from subsuming the artist.