AJ Chronicles: How to Fight the Slop

This week we collected 128 stories on ArtsJournal. Here’s what I learned:

We are drowning in slop.

That’s essentially the diagnosis in Derek Thompson’s sharp essay this week on what he calls “zombie flow,” the algorithmic compulsion to produce vast quantities of content nobody particularly wants. Streaming platforms commissioning shows designed not to be great but to fill a queue. Studios greenlighting sequels to sequels because the algorithm rewards familiarity. Bollywood racing to adopt AI production tools not to make better films but to make more of them faster. The logic is industrial: keep the line moving, and volume is its own justification.

But volume isn’t a strategy, it’s an anxiety. And several of this week’s stories suggest that the institutions and people who understand this are starting to act.

The London Times cut its story count by 20 to 30 percent. The result: more readers, more engagement, more subscriptions — significantly more. Fewer stories, each one carrying more weight turned out to be what the audience actually wanted. Not more, but better.

That word better is doing a lot of work right now across the culture. For decades, institutions could lean on a kind of credential shorthand. Trust us, we’re the museum. We’re the newspaper. We’re the publisher. Quality was often asserted not demonstrated. And that worked for a long time because the institutions controlled the distribution and the audience had limited alternatives. I wrote last week about another version of this — the “excellence problem” — and the importance of getting a more precise definition of what excellence is.

As Thompson reports about zombie culture, the mindless slop has arrived in a tsunami. How does the “good stuff” even find us, lost in the swirling eddies? More important, with all the background noise, do we even recognize “good?”

The AI detection tools that were supposed to authenticate human-made writing can’t reliably tell human from machine, and the technology built to certify quality has itself become unreliable. Then there’re these stories, authentication barriers erected by humans:

• Iowa courts are upholding book bans, deciding which ideas are legitimate by judicial fiat.
• The Holocaust Museum is quietly editing its own exhibits, removing contemporary parallels before anyone officially demands it.
• The Trump administration abandoned its appeal to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services — but zeroed out the funding anyway.

Old systems of certification are failing from every direction: technological, legal, institutional and political. So what’s left when you can’t just say “trust us”? You have to show your work and construct a context, making the case not by institutional credential but by demonstration.

LACMA spent $724 million not to build a bigger museum but to rebuild an argument for what an encyclopedic museum means in 2026. What it collects, how it contextualizes, and who it’s for. Instead of expansion, It’s a hopeful sharpening of curation at the institutional level. When the market is swamped with slop, curation and editing matter more.

A few weeks ago I wrote about going to the Met Opera’s “Tristan” at my local movie house and there being only three people (including me) in the audience. The Met is bleeding cash. Met HD streaming performances used to regularly sell out all over the world. I wrote in the LA Times back in 2007 when the HD simulcasts began that “the Met has reinvented the form. Or rather, it has created a new art form, judging by the Jan. 13 moviecast of Tan Dun’s new opera The First Emperor. This venture may be the most significant development in opera since the supertitle.”

The Met made the case for opera in the movie theatre by treating it as a new form in a new visual language. It really worked. But this Tristan in movie form was visually incoherent on the screen, a facsimile of what was on the stage. Where once the HD productions worked at being evocative and original, a “new art form,” these productions have long since diminished to second rate experiences. The audience has noticed. The Met pedigree can no longer deliver an audience.

But back to this week. The Writers Guild of America’s new four-year deal didn’t just negotiate better pay. It put dollar figures on the claim that the human writer, the person with a point of view, not just an output, has a value that can’t be automated away. Now the writers have to make that case with their work. The Times didn’t just cut volume. It made each remaining story carry more weight and then measured whether the audience noticed. They clearly did.

A lot of what passed for quality in institutional culture was orthodoxy dressed up as standards. “We’re the experts” was a shortcut. It papered over the hard work of actually demonstrating why this particular thing in this particular moment matters to you specifically, not to some abstract notion of culture. That shortcut has stopped working for a while now, and I think the institutions that will matter will be those willing to do the harder thing: not assert quality and relevance but prove it in terms their audiences can feel.

The slop is going to get much worse. But editing and curation and intentionality are becoming the new cultural currency. And scarcity, as any economist will tell you, is where value lives.

Also Worth Your Attention

The Smithsonian keeps losing leaders. The Hirshhorn’s director became the fourth senior Smithsonian departure in two years. The pattern isn’t coincidence, it’s a strategy of attrition. You don’t need to fire anyone if the environment becomes inhospitable enough that talented people leave on their own. The question for the institutions still standing: at what point does self-preservation shade into complicity?

Live Nation’s antitrust trial is really about who owns live culture. The DOJ’s case against Live Nation frames the issue as monopoly pricing, but the deeper question is infrastructure. When one company controls the venues, the ticketing, and the promotion, it doesn’t just set prices — it determines what gets performed and where. Meanwhile, musicians are saying publicly that touring has become financially unsustainable. The monopoly isn’t just extracting money. It’s hollowing out the culture around it.

Josh Kline argues New York’s art world is dying of real estate, not taste. His viral essay makes the case that galleries aren’t closing because art isn’t selling, they’re closing because landlords can charge more for retail. Culture follows real estate, not the other way around. It’s a bracing reminder that the crisis in the arts isn’t always about the arts.

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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.