Thursday, February 05, 2015
One Size Fits All Does Not Fit "The Arts"
Createquity.: If your events and exhibitions have seemed just a bit…emptier lately, you’re not alone. The National Endowment for the Arts’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) reveals that only 33.4% of U.S. adults attended one of seven “benchmark” arts activities—ballet, opera, musical plays, nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, and visiting museums or galleries—in 2012, down from 41% in 1992. Though many a tooth has been gnashed over these statistics since they were released a year and a half ago, on their own they don’t provide much guidance for arts managers desperately trying to stem the tide. In an effort to better understand the reasons for the decline, the NEA decided to sponsor a set of questions on the arts as part of the 2012 General Social Survey (GSS). Administered by the National Opinion Research Center based at the University of Chicago, the highly-regarded GSS has been collecting data on a random sample of nearly 3,000 adults biennially since 1972.
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5 comments:
I feel like Fine Arts are something everyone should respect, admire, and be a part. I'm glad the community is trying to harness what is right and wrong about how society perceives Fine Arts events. It's sad to see the percent of people that go to these events are not as high as they should be. However, it is great to see the 13% of not attenders are interested in being apart of the arts community. And I bet if the community focuses on what they need to do to attract more people that the percentage of attendees will go up exponentially. And fine arts communities are just the best. They are filled with the most interesting people that have these great stories to share and be heard. This is why I think everyone should appreciate and be a part of the community because there is something for anyone who is interested.
I think it is a shame that when the going gets tough, the arts are the first things to go from people’s lives. They are viewed as an extracurricular to someone’s life and not as important as other things. It is not just for enjoyment. Arts have a lot more value to the mind than one would think. It is very sad that attendance to art activities has gone down over the years. I think technology as some impact on that because people would rather sit at home and watch tv or play on a variety of gaming systems than go to a museum or see a show. In the past people went to see a show or went to a museum because that was their form of entertainment and their connection to the world. Now people have the internet and can look up pictures of paintings or find bootleg videos online instead of paying and supporting the arts in person.
I remember seeing this graphic a few weeks ago, but not knowing what exactly to think about it because it was just a bunch of statistics that overlap because people go see the arts, or not see the arts, for more than one reason. I think because of that, it is almost in vain to try to track and pin down Why People Attend. However, I think this article helps to explain more what the infographic was trying to say in the first place because it compares it to the statistics of ten years ago. It is interesting and sad to see that time and money are the biggest obstacles, and that makes sense as that is the issue with pretty much every activity that you could want to do. Though with the economy the way that it is, it is easy to see how someone who already doesn't see the arts on a regular basis would decide to drop that first when trying to save money. It’s really sad that that happens, but it does.
It's especially intriguing to learn about the audience you plan to serve, especially when we are in as diverse a country as America. I really enjoyed reading over the graphic and trying to figure myself into the pools they had divided arts-goers into. The article truly shows how many economic, social, and cultural values go into the viewing of different arts experiences. How we are raised determines what we want to see and what we are interested in. I had a very intense debate with my family one night over the difference between in-borne attraction and attraction that has been fed to us by the media and other visual/audio aspects of our lives. I find that this article will help me back up my argument that most, if not all of our lives' attractions are determined by what we are exposed to. There are some outliers who choose to go towards new and previously unknown items (to them), but most of our population enjoys socialization and seeing things put on stage that we have identified with since our childhoods.
Growing up I was constantly bombarded with the reality that the arts are a dying industry and people nowadays aren’t as interested in the live arts anymore because of the tv at home. So seeing the statistic that only 4.4 percent of the Caucasian community comes to see the arts is no shock what so ever. What I was surprised to learn that so many of the people that do go, go because they want to learn. That right there makes me very happy because I’d like to think those responsible for creating the art just what to enlighten those around them. What I found was the biggest paradox that will be left for now to be unanswered is the fact that many people go to experience high quality art, but yet one of the biggest complaints of those who don’t go are that they can’t afford the high cost. As the saying goes you get what you pay for, so that why there is no way to avoid the high cost because at the end of the day you are paying for the quality you want to see.
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