By revenue, the nonprofit arts sector is small — about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney’s annual revenue alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution in the country combined. But the map of audience shows something entirely different.
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:
Why the Death of American Leadership may run through your Local Orchestra
In the space of a week, we have lost two significant and iconic American institutions. But the shuttering of the Kennedy Center and the decimation of the Washington Post are neither isolated nor unrelated.
The Great Renegotiation: Five Ideas about where Culture is going in 2026
If 2025 is the year that 20th Century culture models stopped working, 2026 is the year we turn to building something new.
Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025
We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a structural shift.
How Should we Measure Art?
Pre-internet, the lines were pretty clear about the binary relationship between artist and audience. Artists created and audience consumed. In today’s digital world, the landscape is fluid—we create and express our identities by what we choose to share online. Sharing, or curating what we encounter both online and in the real world, is perceived as a creative act. In the online world, art doesn’t become activated until people decide to “do” something measurable with it.
Still Amusing Ourselves to Death: Information as Cautionary Tale
It might seem like our current information glut is without parallel, but throughout history observers have worried about the impact of too much information on our ability to rationally process and make sense of it. When we moved from an oral storytelling culture to print with the invention of the printing press. Or with the […]
Classical Music’s #MeToo Stories Are Just A First Step
This week Washington Post arts journalists Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone published results of their six-month investigation of sexual harassment in the classical music business. Some of the stories they put on the record were new; others have been open secrets for years. One of the latter stories – about Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster William Preucil […]
Killing NEA, NEH And PBS Is Just Collateral Damage In The Commodification Of American Values
So it begins. A report in The Hill, then picked up in the Washington Post, says that the Trump administration intends to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and sell off PBS. It’s part of a plan to cut some $10.5 trillion over the next decade. Zeroing […]
So What Exactly Is A “Quantitative” Measure Of The Arts?
Arts Council England says it will use a standardized assessment system called Quality Metrics in evaluating the arts it it considers funding. The system has been developed over several years and is an attempt to create a matrix by which arts experiences can be measured and evaluated. Here are the criteria: Self, peer and public: Concept: […]
When We Allow Technology To Police Our Culture…
Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festival and we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to a few hundred, and streaming the concerts greatly increases the number of people who can hear/see the concerts. Typically, in […]
Sorry – A (Respectful) Dissent On A Well-Meaning Statement On Arts Equity
I would say based on the thousands of stories we sift through every day at ArtsJournal, diversity and cultural equity (along with funding) are right now probably the biggest issues being talked about in the arts community. And rightly so. It’s astonishing to see article after article documenting inequalities in gender, race, sexual orientation and […]
We Asked: What’s the Biggest Challenge Facing the Arts?
Last week we conducted our first ArtsJournal poll, asking readers: What’s the biggest challenge facing the arts? We had 3,191 votes, with the largest percentage – 37% – answering funding. Second at 24% was “relevance/changing tastes” followed by “diversity” at 15% and “leadership” at 13%. Technology came in a distant fifth at 4%. I will […]
If Dance Can’t Pay Its Dancers What Does It Mean To Be A Professional Dancer?
A survey of dancers in the UK last summer reported that “more than half of professional dancers earn less than £5,000 a year from their performance work.” That’s professional dancers. “The statistics also show that around 50% of dancers’ jobs pay less than the minimum wage, and that 70% of dancers have performed in ‘unsuitable work […]
Are Arts Leaders “Cultural” Leaders?
The two terms sometimes get mixed up. They’re not interchangeable. For the most part, the big cultural debates of our time take place without participation of our artists and arts leaders. If artists aren’t participating – let alone leading – it’s difficult to make the case that they’re cultural leaders. Somehow, our public debates about […]