The National Arts Index closed the year 2009 DOWN 3.6 points, according to the annual study commissioned by the non-profit advocacy group, Americans for the Arts.
Built on 81 separate reports of arts activity, the index is always a year behind, so it's not surprising that 2009 wasn't very good. Maybe it's surprising that it wasn't truly dismal -- because some of those individual reports certainly were.
- Art museum visits were down 19 points from 2003, the baseline year in the Index, and the population share of museum visitors was down more than a quarter.
- Attendance at symphony, dance, opera and theatre was down 25 points.
- Philanthropic giving to the arts was down 11 points.
- State funding of the arts was down substantially.
- Non-profits struggled financially, with more than 40 percent running deficits in 2009.
- Between 2003 and 2009, the percentage of the population attending art museums and performing arts
events both decreased (‐19 percent and ‐22 percent, respectively).
The overall index includes publishing, popular music and movie attendance data, tracking the decline of CD and book sales, for example, as both the music and publishing businesses struggled to find new business models to support themselves. So, they are taking "arts" broadly. I have no idea how they are accounting for developments in self-publishing, self-recording, small-scale movie making, etc. Data I've seen indicates that the raw number of books published in the U.S. these days is enormous, though in microscopic editions, for example, and that's not taking eBooks into consideration.
