Change of Scene

Traditional Arts Organizations Need to Update the Plot

By Kevin F. McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy is a senior social scientist at RAND.

A fundamental shift is taking place in the structure of the performing arts in America. In a handful of the biggest cities, the largest and best-known arts organizations are thriving on star-studded productions that pull in the crowds. Elsewhere around the country, hundreds of smaller dance troupes, music groups, and theater companies are proliferating, even though they perform for little or no pay. Squeezed between these two extremes are the traditional midsized arts organizations that have historically been the foremost purveyors of culture to middle America. The midsized organizations now face increasing financial stress.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/MINOT DAILY NEWS/STEPHEN GEFFRE

Members of Rinat Mouzafarov Institute of Dance and Ballet Theatre practice at the McFarland Auditorium in Minot, N.D., on April 27. The group includes children as young as 4 and adults older than 50 performing works in classical ballet, jazz, lyrical, character, and ethnic dance.

There are several reasons for the shift. In particular, the growing reliance of Americans on televisions and compact disc players has outpaced the demand for live performances. This trend has placed mid- sized arts organizations in a particular bind, because they often lack the resources to produce the kinds of star-studded live performances that can draw full houses. As a result, traditional midsized arts organizations need to become either larger and more prestigious (if they have the resources to do so) or smaller and community-oriented (using local talent to keep costs down). In other words, the organizations need to adapt their programs to shifting audiences. The organizations that fail to adapt may disappear.

Arts organizations can do many things to adapt. To begin, they can learn more about why people participate in the arts. With that knowledge, they can design several strategies to build participation. Organizations of all sizes, not just the midsized ones, can tailor their programs to new audiences and increase the overall participation of Americans in the arts.

The shifting landscape of the arts has implications for arts policy. In the future, the market will play a larger role in determining what kind of art gets produced and how it is distributed. Access to the arts will likely hinge on future patterns of demand. Therefore, arts policy should shift its emphasis from increasing the supply of art — through public subsidies of selected institutions and artists — to stimulating the demand for all kinds of art among a wider range of Americans. This demand-focused approach would be more likely to increase the quantity, availability, and perhaps even the quality of the arts nationwide.

Meet the Players

We analyzed the entire national infrastructure of the performing arts in America over the past 35 years. Specifically, we examined the institutional health of theater, opera, dance, and music organizations in the nonprofit, commercial, and volunteer sectors. Our objective, on behalf of The Pew Charitable Trusts, was to evaluate the long-term trends in organizations, audiences, finances, and artists and to identify the implications of these trends for arts policy.

We learned that performing arts organizations are becoming polarized by size rather than genre or sector. Large organizations, both commercial and nonprofit, rely increasingly on massive advertising and marketing campaigns to promote celebrity artists who can draw huge audiences for both live and recorded products. Small organizations, in contrast, are becoming more and more diffuse, focusing on low-budget live performances for niche markets and relying largely on volunteer labor. Midsized nonprofit organizations — particularly those opera companies, symphony orchestras, ballet companies, and theater groups that are located outside major metropolitan areas — face the greatest difficulties in generating enough revenues to cover costs.

Major shifts in audience demands account for these difficulties. American arts consumers today are pursuing art in a way that allows them to choose when and where to pursue it — a trend that favors home-based entertainment options over live performances. The steadily improving quality of electronically reproduced substitutes for live performances has accelerated this trend. In the future, baby boomers will be replaced by a generation of consumers who are even less inclined to attend live performances and more comfortable with entertainment provided through the Internet and other emerging technologies. Americans who do attend live performances are participating in a remarkable variety of productions within their own communities. These trends do not bode well for established arts organizations with more conventional offerings.

Public financing for the arts has also shifted in favor of smaller organizations. Since the early 1990s, federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has plummeted by nearly 50 percent, while state and local funding have compensated for the loss (see Figure 1). This shift has reduced the average size of grants, altered the characteristics of grant recipients, and influenced their programming decisions. In awarding arts grants, state and local governments focus less on the arts per se and more on the social and economic benefits to local communities.

Professional artists are also becoming more polarized between the masses who make little money and the few who make it big. The number of professional artists in America doubled between 1970 and 1990 to 1.6 million, about 261,000 of whom are performing artists. On average, performing artists earn considerably less, work fewer weeks per year, and face higher unemployment than other professionals with comparable education levels. Meanwhile, the presence of superstars tilts the arts market toward the select few. Technological advances have helped to magnify small differences in talent and to spread that information, while marketers have increasingly hyped certain artists as "the best." These developments tend to concentrate demand around a very few stars and to drive their wages high above everyone else's in the field.

If these trends continue, the top-quality, live performing arts could become less accessible to Americans overall. Although top-notch live performances may remain accessible to audiences in major metropolitan areas, the audiences in smaller towns and cities may come to depend on touring productions or those of local, mostly volunteer, arts groups. And although the number of community-based performances will increase, their distribution may become more uneven. Access to these performances may also depend increasingly upon where one lives.

Quality is likely to suffer more than quantity. Several trends are likely to make it more difficult for talented actors, composers, musicians, and dancers to mature artistically. If the number of large and midsized organizations shrinks, and if the income gap continues to widen in favor of the superstars, then young artists will have fewer opportunities to gain experience. Furthermore, if financial pressures compel the large and midsized organizations to tailor their programming for mass audiences, then artistic innovation will probably be discouraged.

To counter these trends, arts policy should focus on increasing the demand for all kinds of art. Government arts funding should emphasize arts education programs that increase individual exposure to, access to, and appreciation for the arts. By promoting arts education, arts policy could help diversify and broaden the audiences for both traditional and nontraditional art forms.

The Plot Thickens

In 19th-century America, the only providers of the performing arts were commercial or amateur artists and organizations. Unlike Europe during this period, America provided essentially no government support for the arts. America also had very little tradition of upper-class patronage.

In the early 20th century, however, the commercial touring companies began to decline. Out of 327 theater companies at the turn of the century, fewer than 100 remained in 1915, and only a few survived into the 1930s. The old touring companies could not compete with the new technology of motion pictures. Later, the phonograph, radio, and television also led to the disappearance of live performing arts organizations.

In the 19th century, audiences had consisted of both the commoners and the elite. In the 20th century, the commoners gravitated toward the movie houses and other new technologies, leaving only the elite to patronize the live high arts.

Thus began the division of the high, popular, and folk arts that has defined the performing arts in America for the past 100 years. The shrunken audiences for the high arts had to pay higher prices, which often took the form of donations or organizational subsidies in addition to user fees. The result of this shift was a new model of arts organization: the subsidized nonprofit organization.

In the late 1950s, America sought stature in the arts commensurate with its economic and political leadership in the world. The Ford Foundation responded with an ambitious scheme to financially revitalize major arts institutions through leveraged matching grants. In 1960, the state of New York took the pioneering step of establishing a State Council for the Arts. In 1965, the federal government created the NEA, the only time since the Depression-era Works Progress Administration that the federal government assumed an active role in directly supporting the arts.

A combination of factors had triggered the reversal of America's long-standing opposition to public funding of the arts: a desire to demonstrate to the world the value of U.S. culture, the acceptance of a broader government role in supporting social goals more generally, the lobbying of arts advocacy groups for greater parity with science in the competition for federal dollars, and the widespread belief that arts and culture were important social assets that could not be sustained in the marketplace.

Within 15 years of the NEA's formation, every state had established an arts agency. In turn, the state agencies spawned more than 3,000 local arts councils. Some of them were units of local government, but most were private nonprofit organizations. By 1980, the transformation was complete: The nonprofit organization had become the dominant mode of supplying the live high arts to Americans.

Today, another major realignment appears to be taking place. In the past decade, The Ford Foundation's leveraged funding strategy has proved difficult to sustain. Political controversy over certain exhibits has reduced federal funding. And the recession of the early 1990s prompted corporate sponsors and private foundations to shy away from unrestricted grants. Individual contributions have grown, but sustaining such growth entails formidable administrative costs.

The stark distinctions that once separated the nonprofit (high art), commercial (popular art), and volunteer sectors have become blurred. The three sectors are increasingly considered complementary rather than competitive. For example, the nonprofit sector is now often perceived to be a training ground for artists for the commercial sector.

Also emerging today is a less hierarchical view of the relative value of each sector. It is now more commonly assumed that a pluralistic democratic society should foster artistic activities that reflect the interests and aesthetics of the entire population rather than the cultural leadership of an elite. For example, many people now acknowledge that performing in an amateur community production is equally as important as attending a top-quality professional performance.

These changes reflect broader social, demographic, economic, and political forces that are transforming American society today. Those forces include the growing diversity of the population, variable working hours that favor home entertainment options, and greater emphasis on privatization and market-oriented approaches for many types of organizations.

Possibly a Happy Ending

Government support for arts education may promote the public benefits of the arts, such as the enrichment of individuals and the transmission of culture. But arts education programs may do little to help the organizations that bear heavy financial burdens today. Those organizations must increase demand specifically for their own programs. Those organizations need to understand (a) how individual tastes for the arts are formed and (b) how to appeal to those tastes.

In our research for the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, we developed a behavioral model to illustrate the main factors that influence individual decisions about participating in the arts. Organizations can use this model to help build participation in their programs.

Key to our model is the idea that there are four different stages in the decisionmaking process (see Figure 2). Different strategies for building participation should work at each different stage. The central issue that arts organizations face in designing strategies is to decide which strategies are appropriate for different target populations and when those strategies should be used.

Individuals will not consider participating unless they are first favorably disposed to the arts. In the initial stage, therefore, the attitudes of individuals toward the arts reflect their personality traits, sociodemographic factors, sociocultural factors, and past experiences. There is little that arts organizations can do to alter these characteristics. Nonetheless, arts organizations could conduct outreach programs with key community organizations, such as schools and churches, to foster arts programs that will help children and their families develop positive attitudes toward the arts. The arts organizations could also display their art in workplaces and other public spaces to raise awareness of the arts in general and of their offerings in particular.

In the perceptual stage, individuals develop an inclination either to participate or not to participate in the arts. Such individuals could be swayed either by personal perceptions about the value of participating or by the perceptions of others in the same social groups. Arts organizations could pique the interest of these individuals by offering programs related closely to their everyday lives, sending artists into the communities, and helping community members recognize the continuum between familiar art forms (such as movies or hymnals) and traditional art forms (such as theater or music). These strategies could help arts organizations to diversify their audiences.

Once individuals decide to participate in the arts, they enter the practical stage. The decision of how and when to participate now depends mostly on practical matters, such as event information, financial costs, transportation alternatives, childcare problems, and convenience. Arts organizations could appeal to individuals at this stage by using the information channels best suited to such individuals (either the media, personal recommendations, workplace presentations, or direct mailings), by varying program schedules and locations, by providing transportation, or by lowering ticket prices. These strategies could help arts organizations to broaden overall participation.

Finally, there is the experiential stage. Deeper participation at this stage depends on the reaction of individuals to their artistic experiences up to this point. Since arts participation, like involvement in other leisure time activities, depends upon individual knowledge and familiarity, arts organizations could make their activities more rewarding by offering seminars, workshops, and post-performance discussions to deepen individual appreciation for the arts. Organizations could also enhance the social dimension of the arts by inviting audience members to social events before or after the programs and including them in the artistic community. These strategies could help arts organizations to deepen the participation of their core audiences.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS/STEVE CUTRI

Members of the Brick City Youth Theatre of Cleveland, Ohio, beat water bottles as drums and march on stilts during an April 19 performance. Brick City is a program supported by the Cleveland Public Theatre for children and youths residing in public housing. The National Endowment for the Arts is starting a national program to help fund free, weekly arts classes for children living in public housing in 20 states.

Two major challenges remain: information and money. Information is critical both to the organizations, which need to understand the attitudes of the participants, and to the participants, who need to know what the organizations have to offer. Unfortunately, arts organizations today rely on largely informal techniques to gather information about the participants. In fact, staff discussions are the most common techniques now used. It is unclear whether such techniques are well suited to collecting the attitudinal and behavioral information about participants that is essential for designing effective outreach strategies. If organizations lack this information, they will be unlikely to communicate persuasive messages to their participants or other potential audiences.

As for money, the arts organizations cannot do it all. Each organization must decide which strategies best fit its overall purpose and mission, its community environment, and its available resources. The framework that we describe here offers a set of generic guidelines to help the full spectrum of arts organizations build participation across a full spectrum of potential audiences.

Government can stimulate demand for the arts through education programs. Arts organizations can stimulate demand through targeted outreach strategies. In this day and age, such efforts to increase demand are likely to be the most fruitful ways to increase the quantity, quality, and public benefits of the arts for American society.

Related Reading

Guide to the Literature on Participation in the Arts, Kevin F. McCarthy, Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, RAND/DRU-2308-WRDF, 2001, 55 pp., no charge.

A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts, Kevin F. McCarthy, Kimberly Jinnett, RAND/MR-1323-WRDF, 2001, 127 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3027-2, $15.00.

The Performing Arts in a New Era, Kevin F. McCarthy, Arthur Brooks, Julia Lowell, Laura Zakaras, RAND/MR-1367-PCT, 2001, 165 pp., ISBN 0-8330-3041-8, $20.00

The Performing Arts: Trends and Their Implications, RAND/RB-2504-PCT, 2001, 6 pp., no charge.