AJ Chronicles: So What’s Working in this Arts Bear Market?

This week we collected 139 stories. Here’s what I learned:

It’s difficult to deny that something structural is failing the arts. Week after week we’ve been documenting a collapse across the sector that transcends any simple bad management. The entire infrastructure is collapsing.

And yet, there are also success stories. Many of them. So this week I want to look at some of those successes and see if there are commonalities.

Tate Modern’s Frida Kahlo retrospective recently broke the museum’s all-time pre-sale record of 41,000 tickets. The same week, 80,000 people stood in a nine-hour online queue for the chance to see the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. But blockbusters are supposed to be dead?

Then there’s the Vegas Sphere, now the highest-grossing arena on the planet, posting an astonishing $386.4 million in revenue in just the first quarter of 2026. What these three share is that they’re selling occasion.

When you look across the culture at what is gaining traction, some common themes emerge. They sell occasion, they sell belonging, and interestingly, they sell permission.

Start with occasion. Gen Z, the generation that grew up surrounded by screens in their playpens, were supposed to be lost to the algorithm. But surprise, Gen Z is now the most frequent moviegoing cohort in America: 87 percent saw a movie in a theater in the past year, compared to 58 percent of boomers. Movie theatre box office has surged this year, and one exhibitor’s explanation is almost embarrassingly simple: “People want to go out… so they came back in hordes.” Streaming demolished scheduled culture, but in doing so made the time-bound, shared occasion scarce. Scarce things become valuable, and that’s also the appeal of Frida and Bayeux. They’re unique experiences you’ll miss out on if you don’t act.

Then belonging. The number of independent bookstores has nearly tripled in a decade, to their highest level since the 1990s, and in the middle of what many consider is a literacy crisis. The stores aren’t selling books; Amazon sells books cheaper. They’re selling membership in a reading life, a culture. This has trickled up to, of all places, Barnes & Noble, which once was seen as the indy store-killer and is now building new stores at a furious pace. Walk into a B&N and you’ll see crowds gathered in the cafe debating the day’s news. It’s all about community. And let’s return to Gen Z, which is not only flocking to movie theatres, but turning out in droves each week to watch reality TV on the big screen. They cheer and groan over characters they’ve come to follow. The community of Love Island.

This same impulse drives sales of romance audiobooks, the fastest-growing corner of a $2.4 billion audio book market, as well as queer literature, and the country music concerts suddenly filling UK stages. Audiences aren’t really buying artforms or genres so much as they’re hungry for identities that artforms let them belong to.

And then there’s permission. Two Gen Z sisters make ballet breakdown videos whose stated goal is to make viewers “feel equipped to say, ‘I understand what’s going on.'” TikTok has turned Rothko into a personality archetype you can dress as. The Savannah Bananas’ choreographer designs routines that camouflage the players with two left feet. The Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalia has made “opera aesthetics” one of Pinterest’s fastest-growing trends, putting out front the look before the repertoire. These winners invite you in as a novice and make novicehood feel thrilling.

The Pittsburgh Symphony’s live-movie score concerts are now so reliably popular they have added $7 million of predictable revenue to the orchestra’s budget, and attendance at the Orchestra’s flagship classical series is up 14 percent. Tate’s record-breaking Frida is a serious retrospective. And Death of a Salesman just played to 100 percent capacity at the Winter Garden on Broadway.

And the failures this spring also suggest this pattern isn’t just “lighter and cheaper.” Pop music has the most accessible canon on earth, but suddenly concerts and festivals aren’t selling this summer, killed by ticket prices one analyst calls obscene. And another Pittsburgh Symphony example: ticket sales to the orchestra’s pops series — light programming with no canon connection to anyone’s identity — keep falling while the movie score concerts rise. Lighter clearly isn’t the lesson.

So what to make of these examples from a limited sample size from the past few weeks? For a century we’ve sold the art and treated occasion, belonging, and permission as amenities, not drivers of desire. In the above successes, I think the common thread is institutions now selling occasion, belonging, and permission, and treating the art as the payload. It’s not a surrender of standards, it’s a refocusing that acknowledges what’s actually for sale. Nobody in the Bayeux queue was there for the embroidery.

Also Worth Your Attention

Record demand won’t fix a broken model. A real caveat to everything above: You can be popular, sell all your tickets and still not make the model work. UK theatres just posted their highest annual attendance ever recorded — 37 million people, with the West End’s 17.64 million running nearly three million ahead of Broadway. But the same report warns that the financial model underneath is failing. Demand is really important, but it isn’t the key to success. An institution can sell every seat and still be structurally insolvent; that’s the cost-disease plague that has spread across the entire performing arts sector. As it stands now, you have to be extraordinary just to survive. How can an industry survive if just the average guarantees failure? LA’s dance scene has seen numerous closures in the past years, with some of its best companies calling it quits. Dance in LA is unsustainable in its current form, and the industry is “on life support.” And no one seems to be paying attention. A visit last week by New York City Ballet didn’t even rate a mention or a review. Anywhere.

The Bananas are out-paying Broadway for Broadway talent. A Tony-nominated actor is now a Savannah Bananas relief pitcher who enters games singing Phantom of the Opera for, as the New York Times dryly notes, likely better pay. This is a market signal: an entertainment brand built on occasion and permission can monetize theatrical craft better than the theater can. When the Bananas value your training more than your industry can, the problem isn’t the training.

Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.