TT: Revisiting the Zero Option

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I look at the high-art attendance crisis and draw a ruthless conclusion. Here’s an excerpt.
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Everyone who keeps up with the National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts data knows that high-culture attendance numbers have been shrinking across the board for well over. Opera, theater, dance, symphony orchestras, even big-city art museums: All are drawing smaller crowds. So what’s the larger meaning of these figures? Three recent articles that view the problem from different perspectives come to similar conclusions:
• Says Jaime Weinman in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s: “The lack of funding for orchestras and opera companies may already be raising the question of whether North America has too many of them–or whether, as with other institutions, there should be more streamlining and consolidations….The Baby Boomers who are becoming the new generation of old people have grown up with rock music, and may not be very likely to invest in classical music.”
• Theater blogger Howard Sherman sees much the same thing happening in his area of expertise: “While in the first half of my life I watched the burgeoning of the resident theatre movement, which in turn seeded the growth of countless smaller local companies, my later years will see a contraction in overall production at the professional level; it’s already begun, as a few companies seem to go under every year and have been for some time.”
• Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, writes in the Huffington Post that we may be “witnessing a major transition in the arts from regional organizations to fewer mega-organizations with the sophistication to mount large-scale productions, to market them well and to raise large sums of money….Does this spell the end of the mid-sized regional arts organization? Will it be increasingly difficult to build an audience and a donor base for a $10 million arts organization? Will boards simply give up trying to fund ever-increasing budgets? Will many of these organizations shrink, or disappear entirely?”
Here’s another question: Might it be possible that some of them should disappear?…
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Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: In the first sentence of this column, not visible here, I originally referred to the Minnesota Orchestra as “strike-bound.” The orchestra is, of course, locked out, not on strike. My mistake–I fell victim to a fit of absentmindedness. (The Journal has corrected the online version of the column.)