We do so love our art omnivores!

By Barry Johnson

A new analysis of the National Endowment for the Arts participation survey from 2008, which basically revealed that attendance is plummeting at most traditional arts events, has sussed out the prime factor in the decline.  It's the decline of both "omnivore" and "high brow" audience members.




An "omnivore" is someone who goes to a wide variety of arts events -- art exhibitions, plays, musicals -- and goes frequently, around one a month. The study defined "high brows" as those who go to a lot of events, but usually confine themselves to the symphony or ballet. And those categories declined dramatically from 1982 to 2008. Omnivores went from 15 percent of the population to 10 percent, a drop of one-third. And they attended around 10 percent fewer events per year.  High brows declined from a little more than 7 percent of the population to 5 percent. Their attendance at individual events went down, too, around 10 percent.

How important are omnivores and high brows to arts groups? If we think of it in political terms, they are the base. Together, they account for more than 50 percent of survey respondents who reported any attendance at arts events, and their decline in numbers and attendance at individual events accounted for around 80 percent of the drop in attendance the NEA reported between 2002 and 2008, when the overall decline was the sharpest.

A few more findings:

1. The cohort (WW II, boomer, Gen X, Gen Y) you are in doesn't seem to have much predictive value on arts attendance overall.
2. Omnivores tend to be younger, though Early Boomers (born before 1955) and the WW II generation are more omnivorous than other cohorts.
3. Omnivores, like all arts event attendees, tend to have more education.

If we translate some of this information to the Portland, Oregon, context, we'd expect to find around 200,000 omnivores and 100,000 high brows (you can't imagine how much I hate that term), a total of 300,000 people in a population of 2.2 million or so in the metro area.  And that 300,000 would account for a lot of attendance at local events, though I'm assuming that they also go to museums outside of Portland and Oregon, not to mention theater, dance, music, poetry readings, etc.

How far might the NEA Death Panels go? All the way...

The NEA should be nurturing its plants.

By Barry Johnson

If you think about it for even a second, Rocco Landesman's meditation on the necessity of Theater Death Panels, which we talked about yesterday, wouldn't stop at theater. The same logic that leads Landesman to want to reduce the number of theater companies applies equally to ballet companies, opera groups and symphonic orchestras.

For example, why should the NEA and its Death Panel partners (local and state agencies and large foundations)  spread their meager resources among orchestras, big and small, around the country? Shouldn't they focus on making a few orchestras really strong, financially, instead, and let the others... go, diminish, expire?

We here in Portland will still be able to go to a movie theater for special showings of Gustav Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic, after all. Their Beethoven is better than our Beethoven, anyway, so what's the problem? And the methods of musical transmission are only going to get better (see Frank Gehry's ultra-wired New World Symphony concert hall/sound studio in Miami, for example).  Soon, those screenings of the flashy young Dudamel will stream directly onto my own 3-D screen and course through my own exemplary sound system. (Well, if I had such fine appliances.)

And in the meantime, precious dollars will go where they'll really do some good -- to the symphonies in LA, New York and maybe Chicago. OK, Houston, too, because Texas has some serious political clout, or so I imagine the Death Panel deciding.

In the abstract, this is a perfectly defensible proposition. And though "Theater Death Panel" (or in this case Symphony Death Panel) is a term admittedly stolen from the Far Right's disinformation campaign against the Health Care Reform Act last year -- with no basis in fact or logic whatsoever -- an argument based in something like reality can be made to support Landesman's position.

Except it can't.