Future of the Arts
Jessica Ryan and
Future of the Arts
The notion that non-profit culture is much smaller than for-profit because fewer people participate is flat wrong. What sticks out in the comparison is the disparity in culture monetization. Per-attendee economics, in round numbers, are instructive. Disney’s domestic parks pull about $190 from each guest in admissions and in-park spending. An NFL game with concessions runs $150 or more. A movie ticket: roughly $11. A nonprofit theatre seat: $25 to $50. A museum visit: $0 to $25, average closer to $10 once you weight free admission and discounted hours. a single Disney park visit is monetized roughly twenty times as aggressively as a museum visit. An NFL game extracts about fifteen times what a museum visit does.
The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale. This isn’t a moral judgment: extraction at scale is what for-profit models are built to do and they do it well. But it means the non-profit sector’s economic “smallness” is structural on purpose, not evidence of marginal cultural standing. The free museum, the priced-for-access regional theatre, the subsidized concert ticket — these aren’t bugs in the design, they are the design.
this is a 1996 guide on how to help someone use a computer. it’s strikingly resonant with ‘how to be a parent’, or really ‘how to help anyone with anything’. a nice example of “the universal within the particular”
This is shockingly close to how we approach building internet-driven live experiences with our collaborators and clients today 🤯
keeping this one one the radar.
The cast is a group of women and nonbinary people originating at ART, a very specific institution that has a recent, problematic history with how they approach representation for nonbinary people. What did ART learn or not learn from past experiences?
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