Future of the Arts
Jessica Ryan and
Future of the Arts
keeping this one one the radar.
On one hand, this trend is potentially devastating for the performing arts industry. On the other hand, this challenge may represent a revolutionary opportunity for these organizations to fundamentally adapt engagement methods and means to change up these experiences as we currently know them – or at least to change up business models so that they
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"Our primary barrier is what I have been saying since I started this job at OSF, and had actually been saying it at the Denver Center too: This industry has relied so heavily on one generation of theatregoer. And that generation has been great to us; they have come to see our shows, they have given us their resources, they have put us in their
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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.