AJ Chronicles: Are Our Attention Spans Killing Culture or Reassembling It?

This week we collected 138 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe]. Here’s what I learned:

Cultural historian Joseph Horowitz published an alarm this week — part of a transcript of a conversation he had with conductor Thomas Fortner about whether classical music can survive a collective collapse of attention. He writes:

“The idea of listening to bits and pieces, sampling a performance, sampling a symphony, is almost irresistible right now. . . . There is no way to listen to Mahler’s 3rd Symphony except to swallow the whole thing. You’ve got to take it all or forget it. It’s not like Mahler 5 where you can enjoy the Adagietto. Mahler 3, you either take it all, or don’t listen to it at all. . . .“

He contends that our attention spans have collapsed, and with it, our ability to access cultural tradition and meaning. But what he’s describing isn’t a classical-music problem. It’s a culture-wide issue, and something familiar to anyone who has had active engagement with the arts over time.

One way of understanding cultural memory, perhaps, is that it used to be constructed vertically. You learned a tradition by going deeper — context built on context and understood through what came before, criticism teaching you how to read what you were looking at. The institutions we built to steward those traditions also nurtured those that created connective tissue: curators, programmers, conductors, critics, conservatories, archives, programs, liner notes. The works without the connective tissue were just notes until they were connected with meaning.

So what’s become of this connective tissue?

LACMA opened its billion-dollar Zumthor building last month, and Carolina Miranda’s Bloomberg review is candid, calling it architectural drama at the expense of art. Not “instead of art” but at the expense of it. The museum purposefully did away with the connective tissue inside that once told visitors why these objects mattered to each other and substituted aesthetic ambience.

This week, the Atlantic published a piece describing how short-form video is now the atomic unit of online content. The vertical Chinese micro-drama has exploded across the globe. These are teeny tiny scenes, often no more than a few seconds long, that tell micro-stories stripped of longer narrative. You watch, supplying your own context. They’re addictive. Somehow they resonate. And they’re almost completely free of nutrition. AI now makes anyone an influencer. And to institutionalize this shift, the world’s first museum of AI-generated art opens in June inside Frank Gehry’s Grand LA. The form is the work stripped of the frame, multiplied toward infinity.

Then there’s this: an AI model determined that a random street artist’s painting is more valuable than a Picasso. So understand: an algorithm reads the entire history of art and decides Picasso is meh and that some rando artist on the street is more significant. It’s easy to dismiss the story, but what’s really happening is that you’re looking at memory that has been disassembled and reassembled without any awareness of what held it together in the first place.

Perhaps this is the real crisis behind the institutional collapses I wrote about last week. The Saudi’s weren’t really renting (for $200 million) the opera productions the Met Opera would bring with them, they were purchasing the cultural credential of the Met, a signifier of the “best.” When Brand America got tarnished because of Trump’s war, that cultural authority lost its value and the Saudi’s bailed.

More examples from this week: The Guardian now has more American readers than the Washington Post. This isn’t just a change in market share. It’s a significant marker in the transfer of editorial authority from a paper that has abdicated its cultural reputation to one that has conscientiously sought to build a place for its journalistic purpose. Then there’s the report that the Adelaide Writers Week was sacrificed to save the broader festival, trading custodial function for fiscal survival. News publishers are blocking AI scrapers — and killing the Wayback Machine in the process, defending revenue by destroying the archive that made their work findable and helping to attach it to the wider cultural record.

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose. The New York Times this week catalogued the rise of classical-music podcasts where listeners want structural analyses of specific symphonies. K-pop fans put their bodies through training regimens like elite athletes to perform choreography they’ve internalized down to the breath. The number of indie bookstores has grown 70 percent in six years, beating Amazon by selling not inventory but curation and community. The New Yorker devotes a long essay to how Martha Graham’s revolution still reshapes what dancers can do. A Mauritanian librarian fights the desert to keep medieval manuscripts intact in a town where the people are leaving. One obsessive in India is single-handedly trying to save the 30 percent of pre-1950 Indian films that haven’t already been lost.

Sure, these are anecdotal stories, but these are stories from just one week. One might argue that at one level, while the surface of culture has become ever shallower, it also offers more opportunity to dive deep.

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.

So is our historical system of assembling cultural authority disappearing? Perhaps it’s being relocated — from credentials and vertical hierarchies to some new expansive assemblage of connective work. From who or what you are in an institutional frame, to whether you can show people how the pieces fit. That’s actually what Horowitz has argued is the role of cultural institutions for a long time. At a time when institutional credential is under broad attack, the ability to make a case for why culture matters has to move beyond bromides and platitudes and assertion of credentials to curation that matters.

And perhaps this is where AI changes the stakes. AI floods the zone with what looks like cultural memory — assembled out of the common body but stripped of any context for it. The slop is constructed from collective memory but also actively decoupling people from the contexts that made the memory mean anything in the first place. Institutions that abandon their custodial and curatorial role won’t be missed in an AI world. They’ll be replaced by it. The difference between a tradition and a vibe is whether anyone is still telling you how the pieces connect.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be making our stand on defending the old gatekeeping. I suspect that fight is over. The work is provenance — not as ownership, but as connective essential. Make the lineage legible. Not the orchestra program of disconnected pretty pieces. Not the museum that mistakes spectacle for meaning. We can’t and shouldn’t outsource cultural memory to algorithms. In order for culture to have meaning, it needs context, and the richer the better.

Also Worth Your Attention This Week

The Adelaide Writers Week story is more revealing than it looks. Internal documents confirm that South Australia’s literary week was killed to preserve the broader and important arts festival that has a $60M economic impact. It was an explicit choice to keep the form (the festival) and shed the function (literary memory). Writers’ weeks are exactly the kinds of places where context gets attached to text in front of an audience. Killing one to save a festival is trading context for fiscal survival. Watch whether other festivals make the same trade quietly in the next eighteen months.

Germany’s call to novelist Matthias Jügler is another side of the throughline problem. When the German government called the author about Mayfly Season and asked which historical sources he’d consulted — and what period he was planning to tackle next — the state was making a claim about who gets to write the story of the GDR’s stolen-children scandal. That’s not just censorship; it’s a custody fight over collective memory. Fictional treatments of recent history are going to keep being a front in these wars.

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