Anyone who has seen Avenue Q—and if you haven't, you should—knows the meaning of the word schadenfreude. It's one of those German portmanteau words, combining the word for "sorrow" and the word for "joy." It means to take pleasure in someone's misfortune. I think of a quote attributed to Clarence Darrow, the mid-20th century lawyer for liberal lost causes: "I have never killed a person, but I've read many obituaries with great pleasure."
All this is a lead-in to write about an essay by Mike Boehm in the Los Angeles Times concerning the NEA's "Survey of Public Participation in the Arts." Boehm's article, titled "The arts see encouraging news in NEA survey," can be found here. The only encouragement in the NEA survey I can see is that some findings are an occasion for schadenfreude, although Boehm doesn't use the word.
Some parts of the survey were released by the NEA last summer. Those findings are reflected in the Afterword of Stage Money, by the way. The whole report was published November 2009.
The overall finding is that attendance at all arts is down by 4.4%, compared to the survey the NEA conducted six years before. Two arts categories did increase, non-ballet dance performances and musical theatre. The musical theatre as a percentage of the population went down a smidgen but population growth increased the total number of attendees. Since the NEA's first survey in 1982, attendance at musical plays declined from 18.6% to 16.7%. For non-musical plays, the decline was more modest: from 11.9% to 9.4%.
What's the encouragement here? It's this: attendance at sporting events went down even more, from 48% in 1982 to 30.6% in 2008.
I don't find this encouraging. Sports are encountering the same pressures on audience numbers as the arts: competition from television and the internet and to some extent a reduction in free time and spending money.
A principal with AMS Planning & Research, a consulting firm advising performing arts centers, is quoted in the LA Times piece, saying, "A lot of times sports is better on television -- instant replay, the comfort of your chair, the close-ups. An arts experience is essentially a live experience, and it's an intimate experience. I think that's helping to keep people going."
Amen.
