Culture is thriving. But the structures built to support it are in peril.
Audiences are hungry. Participation is up in forms that barely existed twenty years ago. The appetite for gathering around art and shared experience — live, local, communal — is undiminished. What’s mismatched is the infrastructure: the business models, institutions, and connective tissue between creators and communities that were built for a world that no longer exists.
I’ve been covering arts and culture for 25 years — as a music critic, arts journalist, editor of ArtsJournal, as a former concert pianist, and now as a researcher tracking how contemporary forces are reshaping creativity and the policy frameworks that govern it. This blog is where I think out loud about what’s changing, what’s being invented to replace it, and what the people trying to do something about it need to understand.
The forces at work are legible if you look at them structurally. AI doesn’t just automate tasks — it attacks the creation bottleneck, flooding the zone with cheap cultural product at the precise moment copyright law is revealed to protect only the copying bottleneck. Platform consolidation has hollowed out the mid-tier institutional infrastructure that once connected art to civic life. The 20th-century models for making, distributing, and sustaining creative work are badly out of sync with 21st-century conditions.
Why “diacritical”? A diacritic is a mark added to distinguish between similar words — from the Greek diakritikos, “distinguishing.” That’s the work: making the distinctions that matter, between what’s actually changing and what only looks like it is.