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:
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died this week at 96. Probably his central insight was what he called the public sphere, that space outside control of both state and market forces where culture circulates freely, ideas get tested, and democratic life lives. It’s not a utopia but a structural condition. Democracy, he argued, required it to exist, and he warned it is never guaranteed.
It’s worth pondering this insight now, because the public sphere is currently being tested: by the market, from inside the institutions that host it, and from the state.
Start with the market, and the digital revolution’s gift to it. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery finalized their merger plans this week, David Ellison promising “a true champion for the creative community.” What he means is scale, one company controlling an enormous portion of our popular entertainment and media culture, including CNN and 15,000 film titles, competing globally against other giants like Netflix and Disney and Apple. The scaling logic has become doctrine since the Silicon Valley model took hold. Grow big or die.
What gets sacrificed in this strategy is the curatorial and editorial function that traditionally lived in the middle of the culture economy. The Big Tech platforms didn’t just change how culture gets distributed, they replaced the public sphere’s function — the editorial judgment, the curation, the deliberation about what matters — with engagement metrics. When monetary value shifts from the content itself to the traffic that that content — any content — generates, the public sphere starts to crumble. The algorithm doesn’t host a public sphere, it optimizes attention. These are not the same thing, and the difference is significant.
The nonprofit sector, which was supposed to be the institutional home of the public sphere, protected from both market pressure and state control by its structure, is currently contracting under the weight of that same shift. Pittsburgh’s two largest theatre companies merged this week, Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Civic Light Opera ceasing to exist as themselves. Last year in Seattle, ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company merged into something called Union Arts Center and the 5th Avenue Theatre effectively handed its building to Seattle Theatre Group in an attempt to survive.
These aren’t growth strategies. These are organizations that couldn’t sustain themselves alone, hoping that shared overhead buys enough runway to figure something out. SMU DataArts reports that 44 percent of arts nonprofits ran deficits in 2024, with contributed revenue falling 30 percent and working capital eroding steadily. The public sphere’s institutional infrastructure — regional theatre, presenting organizations, the mid-tier that connects artists to communities — is shrinking. Not because it failed its mission, but because the financial conditions for sustaining that mission are collapsing around it.
And then there is the state. The Trump administration’s Commission of Fine Arts had a busy week: it approved a commemorative coin for the nation’s 250th anniversary featuring the president in a glowering, fists-on-desk pose. It rejected a White House security center as not beautiful enough. And it proposed replacing the White House’s Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian ones favored by the president. A tiny Queens art school received a $2 million NEH grant for its mission to restore the classical style that “last reigned supreme before the Civil War.” And the FCC chair threatened to revoke broadcast licenses if war coverage displeased the president. This is not mere philistinism, it is the state asserting the right to define what culture is for, to capture the public sphere from above, replacing free deliberation with official narrative.
Habermas’ worry was never that the public sphere would be abolished outright. It was that it would be colonized, gradually taken over by market logic and state power until the space for free deliberation disappeared from the inside, while the institutions nominally hosting it remained standing. Three colonizing forces, operating simultaneously, is new. The digital revolution attacked conditions from the market side over decades. Contraction is attacking from the institutional sustainability side right now. And the state is now attacking from the political side with unusual directness.
It’s worth noting, I think, that attempts to address the current collapse of the non-profit culture sector are focused on changing market forces. But this is a larger, more systemic set of issues that has corroded all of civic life — from culture to education to journalism to our politics — and the institutions and structures that nurture it. Indeed, these forces are so much bigger than any one sector, it’s difficult to know where to start in addressing them.
But look around and you will easily find counterfactual evidence. This week, maybe it was Sinners. Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan swept the Oscars — Best Picture, director, actor, supporting actor, screenplay, with a film that is, by every current industry logic, exactly what you are not supposed to make. It has no original IP. No franchise. It’s rooted so specifically in the Mississippi Delta, Black Southern history, and a singular cultural moment that it resists scaling almost by design. Coogler structured the deal to retain ownership and creative control.
The consolidated market didn’t make it possible. The state didn’t fund it. It came from exactly the kind of specific, creator-controlled, uncommercially-minded space that Habermas was trying to describe and defend. As I say — there are examples everywhere of artists and projects and institutions and communities bucking these forces and creating amazing things that don’t fit current conventional logic.
The public sphere, when it still functions, produces things the market can’t optimize and the state won’t commission. This week, one of those things won everything. The question is: how do we strengthen those things that produce conditions for the work we care about?
Also Worth Your Attention
The AI That’s Already Inside the House. Three stories this week: Hachette pulled the book Shy Girl on both sides of the Atlantic after questions surfaced about AI-generated content — a publisher that either didn’t look hard enough or hoped nobody would notice. Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, sued OpenAI for scraping nearly 100,000 articles to train its models without permission, a lawsuit framed in copyright terms, but whose stakes go further: the dictionary and encyclopedia are the infrastructure of shared meaning, and AI companies built themselves on that infrastructure without paying for it. Lastly, a Scientific American study found that users who wrote with biased AI autocomplete shifted their own expressed views toward the AI’s. The tool seems to be quietly warping judgment from the inside, and that seems to make sense if you think about it. Tools have always come to shape the things we make with them. The threat to creative culture from AI isn’t only the cheap synthetic content flooding the zone, it’s the subtler reshaping of how writers think, what publishers are willing to stand behind, and whose work gets treated as the default source of truth. All three of those are in play simultaneously.
Barnes & Noble Is Having a Moment. Barnes & Noble opened 60 new stores last year and is reportedly preparing for an IPO. The reason is interesting: the chain has been essentially rebuilt from the inside out by its current owner, who pushed authority back to individual stores, let booksellers curate their own shelves, and stopped trying to be Amazon. It became, in short, less everything, more specific and more human. This makeover didn’t coincide with the current AI moment — the turnaround predates it — but it suggests a market truth. The readers who want a book that risks a singular vision want a bookstore that reflects a particular community’s taste rather than an algorithm’s inventory optimization. books as culture rather than commodity. The appeal to cultural specificity seems to be working in publishing retail for the same reason it worked at the Oscars.
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.
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