Culture awards of all kinds have been steadily losing their currency over the past decade. So what’s going on?

We collected 118 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe] this week. Here’s what I learned. The detail that stuck out in the Metropolitan Opera’s announcement last fall that it had made a $200 million deal with the Saudi government to take the company to perform in the Kingdom for three weeks every winter was not the eye-popping […]

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.

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.

Evidence abounds this week that the battles for culture are intensifying. Taken together, these tests of authority over cultural institutions are probes of where the line is, of how much self-censorship the cultural sector will perform without being explicitly required to.

My weekly pondering on arts and cultural stories for the week of February 22nd.

This week there’s a question that connects nearly every story. Who gets to decide what’s real? A viral AI-generated video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt is racking up views. Neither actor consented or was paid. SAG-AFTRA is furious. Lawsuits await. Meanwhile, Tracey Emin is telling young artists to buy cameras, keep diaries, and send […]

My weekly essay reflecting on arts stories of the past week.

Existential crises have a way of forcing clarity. Whether the arts and the larger creative world are in crisis I leave for you to decide. But with weekly news of financial and organizational meltdowns, political pressures and an almost primordial angst about threats of AI, some things may be becoming clearer about what matters and/or what works.

This week, ArtsJournal looked at thousands of stories and collected 118 stories across culture. This is one person’s attempt to make sense of them.