The threat isn’t that AI replaces artists. It’s subtler and more coercive: that an algorithmically saturated environment erodes the capacity for the kind of thinking that we like to think art requires. Tolerance for ambiguity. Patience with difficulty. The willingness to be bored before a breakthrough.
AJ Chronicles: How to Fight the Slop
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.
From Messages to Conversations: AI Agents are Changing how we Find Culture
The first audience for your art is becoming a machine. The question isn’t just how to optimize for that machine, it’s what you give it to say, and whether what it says is worth a conversation.
AJ Chronicles: The Excellence Problem and Why it Matters
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think defining what we mean by excellence really matters if we’re going to figure out the place of AI in creativity. Four stories this week suggest layers to this debate:
AJ Chronicles: Why Tech Infrastructure is Becoming the Most Important Arts Story of 2026
The infrastructure carrying culture to audiences — legal, technical, financial, corporate — was not built for the creative sector. It was built by and for technology companies, telecommunications firms, and entertainment conglomerates.
AJ Chronicles: What Habermas Feared for our Public Sphere
This week we collected 118 stories. It’s worth noting, I think, that attempts to address the current collapse of the non-profit culture sector are focused on changing market forces. But this is a larger, more systemic set of issues that has corroded all of civic life — from culture to education to journalism to our politics — and the institutions and structures that nurture it. Indeed, these forces are so much bigger than any one sector, it’s difficult to know where to start in addressing them.
What Ireland’s Basic Artist Income Experiment tells us about a new Arts Economy
Ireland demonstrated something: economic insecurity doesn’t just force workers out, it diminishes the overall creative economy. That matters enormously right now, because we are entering a period when a lot of people across a lot of industries are about to lose their job security.
AJ Chronicles: The Biggest Fights about Culture
These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. This week we collected 118 stories. Here’s what I learned:
Paramount and Live Nation/Ticketmaster Won Big Last Week: Here’s why Orchestras and Theatres (and Consumers) Lost
Two huge culture industry deals in the past week, both in entertainment, and maybe they don’t seem connected. Certainly not connected to non-profit arts. But these are exactly the kind of culture infrastructure deals that should worry anyone in the commercial or non-profit culture business because they impact us all. Here’s why.
AJ Chronicles: “Future Vision” and what the Boston Symphony signaled this week
The Boston Symphony’s board didn’t fire Andris Nelsons as its music director. Not exactly. They declined to renew his contract because he and the BSO weren’t “aligned on future vision” — the board’s own words, offered without apology. Not artistic differences. Not budget. Not performance. Future vision. That phrase is doing a lot of work here, and it’s worth thinking about, because it signals a structural institutional shift, one that appears, in different vocabulary, in many of the stories in arts and culture this week.
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