CMU School of Drama


Monday, July 03, 2017

Like it or not, we are in the midst of a second arts revolution

Chicago Tribune: In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts put out a genuinely surprising report: Audiences — those attending jazz, classical music, opera, dance and theater performances — were in serious decline as a percentage of the adult population of America.

Yet worse, the data implied that all of the effort to diversify those audiences had not worked. The audiences of 2002 looked very much like the audiences of 1982: disproportionately white, affluent, educated, older and female. The NEA tried to put an optimistic spin on its findings (it noted that Sept. 11, 2001, had disrupted lives), but it was still the rare NEA report that actually interests a newsroom like this one.

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