Douglas McLennan is a longstanding arts and music journalist, working for Seattle Post-Intelligencer and later founding ArtsJournal, which he has edited since 1999. Widely published as a contributor, he writes AJ’s Diacritical blog.
For those outside the US, the second Trump administration’s frequently destructive actions have been dizzying and often hard to keep up with. What has happened to US arts and music institutions in that time?
The accounting is grim, and you’ve probably read most of it. The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities have been hollowed out and grants rescinded mid-cycle, the Kennedy Center’s board was purged and its programming gutted, the Smithsonian was ordered to sanitize how it tells American history, and the federal agency supporting libraries and museums was effectively shuttered. The whole apparatus and infrastructure of public culture is being dismantled at astonishing speed.
But we should also talk about resilience: the federal government was never the main funder of culture here. The NEA’s entire budget was smaller than the Metropolitan Opera’s. What the feds provided was legitimacy – a signal that culture was part of the national project. And it also subsidized access to culture. Removing the signal matters more than removing the money. And shrinking access is a tragedy.
I think the most corrosive damage isn’t what government is doing to institutions, it’s what institutions feel they have to do to adapt pre-emptively – the programming choices not made, the statements not issued, the risks not taken. The internal censor is always more thorough than the one imposed on you, and you can see signs everywhere of the withering of ambition.
You’ve suggested that many of the things we’re seeing now are the result of deeper problems in US cultural life. Can you expand on what you mean?
Trump is really the accelerant, not the ignition. For most of the 20th century, the relationship between artists and audiences was heavily mediated and nurtured by newspaper critics, classical radio hosts, record-store owners, school music programs, civic concert series, arts-page editors. None of them made the music but they made the music findable and meaningful. I call that layer the civic middleware of culture, and over the past twenty years it has largely collapsed.
Big Tech transferred the economic value of cultural products from the things themselves to the attention those things could attract. One of the most-played tracks on the streaming platforms is a recording of a vacuum cleaner – babies find it soothing, exhausted parents press play, and the streamers pay by volume. When volume of attention becomes the scale, a Beethoven symphony and a vacuum-cleaner-for-babies track look identical to an algorithm. The middleware was paid for by a logic of quality, education, context and cultural memory that the attention economy does not recognize and will not fund. I think that everything about the state of our cultural ecosystem flows from that one simple redefinition of value.
Today, music is easier than ever to access – a vast sea of recordings is available at the touch of a button. But at the same time, it’s getting harder for listeners to orient themselves. What’s happened?
The audience didn’t disappear, but the map to the audience has largely disappeared. Thirty years ago there were multiple paths in: a classical station on the FM dial in any city of size, a newspaper critic who told you what to listen for, a music program in school, a record-store clerk who knew Steve Reich from Steve Roach. None of that exists at scale anymore. What replaced it is the algorithm, which is structurally indifferent to music, optimized to reinforce what you already like rather than expanding taste and developing it.
Then there’s the purely technical reason. The taxonomy of digital music, the way you could find recordings in the digital universe in the first twenty years was designed for pop music. If you already knew the classical music landscape and knew where to look, you could still find things. But for a newcomer, classical was all but unfindable. That’s not how you regenerate new audiences.
So the people who learned the map under the old infrastructure still find their way to the hall. The people who didn’t, don’t. It looks like a demand problem, but it’s really a mapping problem.
Then there’s the whole shift from “owning” recordings, to streaming them. When you own something, you commit to it, you go out and find it and buy it. It’s an investment. When music is streamed and any track in the catalog is only a click away, your commitment to a performance, a recording, an artist, is loose. As soon as your attention wanders, you click off to something new. It’s an entirely different way of listening and cultivating musical taste.
How have orchestras and other music institutions adapted to this new situation?
Unevenly. The story isn’t “American classical music is in trouble” (an evergreen trope journalists have been writing about for 50 years), it’s that some institutions are doing well – the LA Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, a handful of mid-sized orchestras in cities that have built civic identity around them – while many of the storied middle-tier and big orchestras are in serious trouble. Structurally, they mostly don’t work as a business model anymore. We’re stuck in a non-profit model that hasn’t appreciably evolved since the 1960s when it was created.
The healthy orchestras have figured out they’re not actually selling concerts anymore. They’re selling membership in a cultural project that helps define a community. They’ve figured out they have to rebuild the middleware connective tissue themselves, locally, and by hand, because nobody else was going to do it.
Most of the rest are still building their marketing and season brochures around the traditional subscriber, who is ageing out and not being replaced. They’re speaking to the only audience that still understands the old map, while the occasional buyer and the event-goer, the segments actually growing, are not in these channels.
Living in Seattle, one of the major centres of wealth in the US, how have arts organisations approached their donor bases in recent years? Can orchestras survive financially?
Seattle ought to be the perfect laboratory for this. We have billionaires. We have tens of thousands of millionaires. But the arts community is still sucking air. Why? Our Tech wealthy made their money “changing the world”, and when they think about philanthropy they want to fund changing-the-world stuff – curing cancer, going to Mars. Arts organizations haven’t learned to make the case that art belongs in the world-changing category, that imagination and ambition are the same project.
The bigger issue, though, is that civic philanthropy itself was middleware. Industrial-era money – Boeing, Weyerhaeuser – came pre-routed into orchestras and museums because leaders of these companies believed it was important to invest in their communities. Trustees rotated through boardrooms because that’s what people of a certain aspiration did.
This system, unlike that of the EU and UK, was the foundation of our arts support. The new generation of Tech wealth has no equivalent pipeline into culture, or, for that matter, most civic life. You can see the collapse of the old system everywhere: the Metropolitan Opera built its near-term financial plan on a $200 million Saudi sovereign-wealth deal that could be cancelled on a Zoom call. Now it’s selling naming rights to its theatre and auctioning off ownership of its famous Chagalls.
Can orchestras survive? Sure. There is plenty of money in the United States, but the connections between that money and the institutions are broken, and until they’re rebuilt, every American flagship cultural institution is one geopolitical event away from its own version of the Met’s crisis.
How can arts organisations advocate for themselves in this new environment? Have some been more successful than others?
I think the trap is instrumentalization, culture asked to prove its worth in a currency it’s not built to compete in. Economic-impact studies, tourism multipliers, downtown-revitalization decks. These arguments concede the premise that art doesn’t matter on its own terms, and they lose anyway: on jobs-per-dollar, an orchestra will never beat a stadium.
The organizations doing this well have stopped advocating in the abstract and started embedding. They describe themselves as a cultural organism in a city rather than a producer of concerts that happens to be located in one, perhaps a more modest description of what they do, but a much bigger description of what they are. When an institution is woven into a city’s sense of itself, advocacy stops being a lobbying function and becomes a byproduct of being necessary. The ones still commissioning economic-impact studies are advocating for a model while the successful ones are advocating for a relationship.
You’ve talked about an identity crisis lying behind the current dispute at the Boston Symphony – is this something all orchestras are facing?
Yes. Boston just happens to be fighting it in public. The board forced out Andris Nelsons without consulting the musicians and citing misalignment on “future vision”. Two years earlier, San Francisco lost Esa-Pekka Salonen in the same fight from the opposite side of the table. He quit because the board wouldn’t fund the future he saw. In both cases, orchestra managements weren’t able to articulate what the compelling “future vision” is. And they’re getting roasted in public because they haven’t.
The old model assumed the audience already knew why the orchestra mattered. The middleware layer did the explaining, so the institution didn’t have to. That assumption is gone and the institutions now have to make the case themselves. Making the case is a different job than music directing, involving curation, civic embedding, partnership-building, identity work, and yes, fundraising. Middleware work, internalized. The orchestras that have redefined the job – LA, Detroit, San Diego, St Paul – are explicit about it. The ones that haven’t end up fighting about identity in headlines instead of mission documents. The orchestra doesn’t seem to know what an orchestra is supposed to be in 2026, so how is everyone else to know?
Despite the loss of many local newspapers – and arts and music criticism to go with it – do you think there’s still an appetite for depth and curiosity in arts writing?
From my vantage point, the appetite has never been greater. What’s changed is its direction: depth went lateral. The vertical institutional architecture of cultural authority cracked, but the people who wanted context are building it themselves, on Substack, in newsletters, in the surge of classical podcasts doing structural analyses of specific symphonies for audiences newspaper criticism never reached. I’ve read over a thousand stories a week for 26 years of running ArtsJournal, and I can say unequivocally there is more and better writing about culture now than when I started in 1999. It’s just not in the places it used to be. And there are gaps.
What’s been lost is the beat. When a newspaper committed to covering a scene, everyone knew someone was paying attention and institutions felt accountable. Freelance coverage doesn’t really do that. So the question isn’t whether criticism survives; it does, as practice. It’s whether the function survives at the scale culture needs, which is a different thing.
What can publishers and writers do in the face of this transformation to arts in the US?
Recognize that you are middleware now – and that there are two distinct futures on offer. One is criticism as signal of quality: curation, recommendation, the trusted ear that tells a busy person what to listen to next. That job competes directly with the algorithm, and it has to be better than the algorithm at the things the algorithm can’t do – discern context, taste, surprise, and the willingness to be wrong in interesting ways. The other is criticism as cultural framing, the long argument about what this music is for, what the new piece means, and what’s at stake in a living tradition. That job competes with nobody, because nobody else is doing it. But the old institutions, the newspapers, foundations, and universities, aren’t coming back to subsidize these roles, so it has to be paid for some other way.
