What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.
Archives for May 2026
AJ Chronicles: Hollywood, 6; Non-Profit Arts, 1
Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century. The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once. Now there may no choice. But what’s the case?
AJ Chronicles: The Venice Biennale Blows Up — Some Takeaways
Culture awards of all kinds have been steadily losing their currency over the past decade. So what’s going on?
So Just How Big is the Culture Audience? (comparisons that may make you rethink)
By revenue, the nonprofit arts sector is small — about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney’s annual revenue alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution in the country combined. But the map of audience shows something entirely different.
AJ Chronicles: Are Our Attention Spans Killing Culture or Reassembling It?
Depth hasn’t disappeared. Perhaps it’s gone lateral. The vertical architecture that produced “official” cultural memory has cracked, but the appetite for tradition — for context, for lineage, for the why — has migrated to wherever audiences and individuals can build their own context and throughlines. Sometimes those lines are deep obsessive sturdy. Sometimes they are skimming across the surface of micro-videos and news of the day.