Americans for the Arts Bringing More Bad News

The Americans for the Arts, an arts advocacy group, just published its National Arts Index and the data aren't encouraging.  The Index attempts to be for the arts what the Dow Jones Industrial Index is for the stock market.  To that end, the National Arts Index combines data from many different aspects of the nation's arts endeavors, some denominated in money, some in degrees, some in world premieres, some in percentages.  How one can justify combining these varied numbers into one number is difficult to imagine.  (The Dow Jones is statistically manipulated but at least starts with things that are all the same denomination: stock prices.)  But even if the Arts Index is unrealistic, the report is not because it details from where the figures come.  The data the Americans for the Arts published are dismal, if not surprising, to anyone interested in the arts.

Over the period from 1999 to 2007, not-for-profit arts revenues grew 21 percent but the number of nfp arts groups, fighting for a share of those revenues, went up 60 percent.  Attendance at live theater dropped from 50 million in 2003 to 39.6 million in 2009.  This is based on market surveys by  Scarborough Research. According to figures coming from the Theatre Communications Group, attendance at nfp theaters went from a high of 34.3 million in 2003 to 30 million in 2009.  Giving to nfp arts groups is down from most sources.The number of world premieres performed by American theaters is down from a high of 348 in 2003 to 247 in 2009.   

As the report notes as the first of its findings in the introduction: "The arts follow the nation's business cycle."