Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This week we collected 118 stories. Here’s what I learned:
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest fights in culture aren’t about money or talent, but about authority and the right to say what matters, what belongs where, what counts as art, who writes and records history, and whose story gets told and how. Institutions were built to umpire these fights. This week, several stories illuminate:
- A Reuters investigation claims to have finally unmasked Banksy, an artist whose global market value was built, deliberately and systematically, on the refusal to be known.
- The oldest known photographs of enslaved people — daguerreotypes taken in 1850, held by Harvard for more than a century and a half — finally made their way to the International African American Museum in Charleston this week, after a seven-year legal fight.
- UK museums, a Guardian investigation revealed are sitting on more than 263,000 items of human remains from around the world — skulls, skeletons, mummies, hair — much of it acquired under colonial conditions.
- In Sudan, more than half of the National Museum’s holdings have been looted.
- In France, a missing page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, one of the foundational documents of Western mathematics, turned up quietly in a library.
- And Italy paid €30 million to keep a Caravaggio portrait out of private hands and in public view.
Each of these stories pose a form of the question: who controls culture, and on what basis?
The first is restitution, a global reckoning with enormous amounts of cultural material that ended up in the wrong hands under conditions that ranged from dubious to brutal. Harvard held on to the daguerreotypes for 174 years. The UK’s 263,000 items ended up in collections without anyone’s permission. And then there’s the Kennedy Center, still very much in the news as Richard Grenell departed this week, leaving. As the NYTimes put it, the institution is “drastically changed, and in many ways diminished,” a reminder that institutional custody of culture is always conditional, always political, and always contestable.
The second is AI. CNN ran a story this week about what happens when AI authentication systems and human experts disagree about who made a painting. That sounds like a technical issue until you see it’s also a question about authority and whose judgment we trust and why. The machine was trained on vast amounts of provenance data, but the data was assembled by humans whose own judgments were shaped by market forces, personal relationships, and historical exclusions. The algorithm is not neutral and it takes on the biases of those who’ve built and trained it.
The third and most philosophical issue is perhaps the deepest: a growing recognition that origin and identity are not separable. Psyche published an essay this week on why you can’t love a clone (who even thinks up these questions!), even a physically perfect one, because what you love isn’t just the thing, it’s this particular thing and its history of being itself. “The fact that it is not the same has an impact on what we are affectively able to do,” the story posits. The Banksy story, taken in this context, is poignant. An artist who spent decades building his market value in depending on anonymity, on the impossibility of provenance, now faces the reality that provenance was never optional, and that our hunger for knowledge of origin always mattered.
Do these connections seem tenuous? I think these questions have surfaced because these issues are arising in many different forms:
- Digitization makes copies perfect and cheap, so the original becomes precious in a new way.
- Political disruption forces institutions to answer the question they’ve been deferring — whose culture, exactly, are you the custodian of?
- AI makes aesthetic quality reproducible, so provenance and process become markers of authenticity.
- And the restitution movement isn’t just about correcting historical wrongs; it’s about the notion of rightful custody actually matters and can’t be erased by time and institutional inertia.
These are messy issues without clear lines of argument. The Caravaggio that Italy bought to keep in public hands — was it public enough before? The Harvard daguerreotypes are finally home — but who decided when “finally” meant they could be returned? AI authentication may be more consistent than human experts — but consistent application of a biased dataset is just error reproduced at systemic scale.
Custody of culture has always been contested. I’d like to think that as the sophistication of our diversity has grown, and as our new technologies challenge what our basic cultural identities are based on, we get more intentional about how and why culture is created and what it’s used for.
Also Worth Your Attention
Culture’s Disappearing Middle Class. This week produced more evidence. Bodytraffic, one of LA’s finest contemporary dance companies, is closing after 20 years, its founder burned out on the crushing demands of perpetual fundraising. The plucky Boston Philharmonic will shut down after next season when music director Benjamin Zander, now 87, retires. Classical Music magazine, publishing since the late 1970s, is closing. The art market grew in 2025, but only at the very top, with galleries barely making any gains. Then there’s a remarkable report that Broadway has become so expensive that American plays now debut in London instead, because even flying casts across the Atlantic costs less than mounting it on 45th Street. And fewer than ten full-time book critics remain in the US, even as a million books are published annually. These are not isolated crises; this is real-time cross-sector documentation of the collapse of our culture middle class.
Self-Censorship Is the real insidious Filter. Three stories this week from entirely different contexts but the same issue. The BBC commissioned a documentary about healthcare in Gaza, and then refused to air it, its own journalists shocked to discover their Palestinian sources had been right not to trust them. Germany’s culture commissioner is now consulting the domestic intelligence agency before approving grant funding to bookshops, on the grounds that some of them may carry politically inconvenient titles. And a long essay in Harper’s from 2024 argues that the past decade’s political identity requirements in contemporary visual art made it “predictable and dull,” not because the politics were wrong but because they became a filter applied before the work was even made. We include this critique as an essay in LitHub, citing the Harper’s essay, explores the politics of raising difficult identity politics.
The most dangerous censorship isn’t outright, it’s the anticipatory self-edit, the film that never gets commissioned, the book that gets returned before submission, the painting conceived to pass the ideological test. By the time anyone might object, the decision has already made.
See you next week.
Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.
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