The Attention Economy Is Killing the Arts
Chalamet is right that audiences are abandoning high arts—but wrong to think Hollywood is immune to the same cultural forces.
Responding to:
Timothy Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey: A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event
Aired on CNN on February 21st, 2026
The core disagreement: Chalamet assumes atrophy is exclusive to older art forms, while the same forces—shortened attention spans and loss of cultural memory—are dragging Hollywood toward similar obscurity.
WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT
Chalamet, unfortunately, isn’t wrong: the high arts are on life support. Opera attendance plunged nearly 68 percent from 2017 to 2022, and ballet fell 36 percent. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2024‑25 season sold just 72 percent of its seats, while New York City Opera collapsed into bankruptcy. Artists outraged over Chalamet’s comments miss the point: these are symptoms of a far deeper cultural illness.
WHERE THEY GO WRONG
Only the aloofness of the A-list celebrity could make Chalamet so critical of the world’s oldest art forms, and so capable of misdiagnosing his own industry completely. Hollywood itself is collapsing. The Oscars are a revealing microcosm: in 1998, 57 million people tuned in to watch Titanic dominate; today the broadcast struggles to reach roughly 20 million viewers, a 65 percent drop from its peak. U.S. moviegoing has fallen just as sharply: annual ticket sales dropped from about 1.3 billion in 2019 to roughly 764 million in 2025 (a 40 percent decline in six years), remaining well below pre-pandemic levels despite blockbuster releases like Barbie and Oppenheimer.
This collapse aligns closely with a shift in how audiences consume media. Between 2015 and 2018, Instagram video, Snapchat Stories, and algorithm-driven feeds began pulling audiences toward endlessly refreshing, bite-sized content. From 2019 to 2021, TikTok accelerated the trend, drawing more than a billion users each month into ninety-second dopamine loops. Combined with pandemic lockdowns and fatigue with celebrity culture, audiences now engage with movies, once a defining American art form, differently. Researchers document a generation craving bright colors, violent CGI, and short runtimes over rich, cultivated craft.
THE REAL STORY
Short-form video is reshaping how people consume and remember stories by weakening our capacity for sustained attention. Researchers at Cornell University found that rapidly changing clips, like those on TikTok, degrade prospective memory—the ability to remember intentions or follow through on tasks—making it harder to track longer narrative arcs. A 2025 study similarly found that heavy short-video use weakens sustained attention and memory. As Matt Damon recently noted while promoting The Rip, streaming platforms increasingly ask writers to reiterate plot points throughout dialogue to compensate for audiences watching while distracted by their phones. The result: a culture capable of watching, but increasingly unable to remember what they’ve seen.
WHY THIS MATTERS
When a culture loses the ability to sustain attention, it loses the ability to transmit meaning. The arts have historically preserved shared memory, moral imagination, and civilizational inheritance, and when audiences abandon sustained forms of storytelling, those cultural functions weaken. The decline of opera, ballet, and even cinema reflects not just changing tastes but a deeper erosion of cultural attention. What’s at risk is more than entertainment: it’s our capacity to converse, to feel deeply, to reflect and draw connections, and ultimately, to make meaning of our own world and our place in it.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The decline of the high arts is not an isolated failure of taste. It is a warning: the same attention economy reshaping culture is already eroding Hollywood’s audience as well. When people lose the capacity to sustain attention, every art form will eventually suffer. The real crisis facing the arts is not relevance, but whether a distracted culture can still sustain the forms of storytelling that once shaped its imagination.
Grace Salvatore is Senior Editor of Media, Arts, and Culture at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow her on X @grace_daley_s.
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And I'm finding more and more that comprehension of what is written is flawed or misinterpreted. Comprehension is a childhood skill. What is happening?
Overlooked in this essay is the REAL economy. Money, or lack of it, makes it difficult to attend high-priced performing arts. I have been producing and presenting the performing arts for 50 years and have seen audiences to opera, ballet and classical music evolve from broad middle-class (with children) to much older affluent retirees. The problem: Ticket prices which have outpaced wages. Something had to give in the family budget. Taking a family of four to the ballet or opera is a $500 plus hit. On occasions when event producers make those events inexpensive, specifically to attract young and new audiences, they sell out.
There are other factors such as lack of early exposure to these so-called high art forms. Not as many schools take their students to see live performing arts as before. And there are not as many school band, orchestra and dance programs as there once were.
Fortunately, there are other types of art: performing arts, visual arts AND experiential arts, that are not expensive and which younger people find their way to in droves. Creativity will live on.