Seats – photo by flickr user Ryan Wiedmaier

Build. Build. Build. So goes the unofficial mantra of arts marketers as arts organizations seek to maintain relevance in a changing society. Along with the parallel pursuit of financial stability, the goals have been clear: build demand for arts experiences to build and diversify audiences that build revenues. But the how in this seemingly linear formula – the pathways toward achieving these goals – remains less clear.

A 2016 report from the Australia Council for the Arts flips the usual script by drawing attention to the supply side of the equation. In “Showcasing Creativity: Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts,” researchers Jackie Bailey and Hung-Yen Yang of BYP Group aim to understand the motivations – and the barriers – involved in presenting performances by Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (the “First Nations” referenced in the title). In contrast to most previous examinations of audience development and diversification, this study focuses on the programs themselves, and the people curating them. How does the current performing arts landscape in Australia promote or prohibit inclusive cultural narratives? What does it take to establish a supportive, equitable infrastructure? What cultural factors get in the way?

“Showcasing Creativity” is the second study in a series of three that explore Indigenous performing arts in Australia from the perspective of audiences, the market (i.e., presenters and producers), and the creators, respectively. The sequence of studies alone suggests multiple nuanced paths toward building audiences. More notably, it contextualizes the notion of audience development by placing it within a broader framework for addressing cultural inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. In other words, it paints a picture of audience development as one point of intervention among many.

Interest vs. Attendance

In a national arts participation survey from 2014, nearly two-thirds of Australians surveyed expressed interest in First Nations performing arts (i.e., works with Indigenous creative involvement, Indigenous cultural expressions, or content tied to Indigenous-related histories, groups, or politics). However, the survey revealed that only one in four actually attended First Nations arts events. Exploring this gap between interest and attendance, “Showcasing Creativity” analyzes data collected through a mixed-methods approach that includes a mapping of publicly available programs across 135 “mainstream” venues (defined as presenting works from various cultural backgrounds with no sole focus on Indigenous arts and no control or management solely by Indigenous people); a survey among 44 mainstream presenters, six Indigenous presenters, and 11 producers; and 40 interviews with presenters and producers, half conducted before the survey and the other half after.

“Showcasing Creativity” primarily focuses on shortfalls in programming and marketing that, if addressed, might improve and increase opportunities to present First Nations performing arts. An assessment of the landscape revealed a number of key findings.

• Programming: Only 2% of approximately 6,000 works programmed in 2014-15 or 2015 (depending on a venue’s season) were First Nations performing arts. Moreover, a mere 12 presenters of the 135 included in the mapping were responsible for more than a third of this programming. Nearly half of Australian presenters did not program First Nations arts at all, and more than a third of works programmed were small in scale, with less than five performers. Five works, produced by companies with known brands, accounted for almost a third of total First Nations arts programming.
• Marketing: Though audiences perceive First Nations arts as “traditional,” they are motivated to engage with contemporary works, which accounted for 84% of First Nations works presented in 2015. Only a third of presenters reported that their most recent First Nations program, on average, filled more than 75% of house capacity. Although a third of survey respondents reported that box office results failed to meet their expectations over the past two years, audience satisfaction for those who attended was high – suggesting that box office results might be attributed to limited reach in marketing, as opposed to likeability of works.

Presenters also cited several motivators for presenting First Nations arts, including opportunities to:

• engage existing audiences with new and/or challenging content
• build new audiences
• support more Indigenous works
• engage local Indigenous communities
• demonstrate breadth in artistic excellence
• meet strategic goals tied to community engagement or a broader reconciliation agenda

Perceived Barriers

What, then, comes between these motivators among decision makers and the actual implementation of programs? One such obstacle is financial risk, which can be prohibitive for some presenters and producers. Nearly half of survey respondents cited financial risk as a major obstacle, along with the price tags attached to available, brand-name works. This partially explains why presenters tend to opt for smaller, cheaper productions. Despite this perceived risk, the report highlights opportunities to grow attendance in metropolitan areas, where there are more risk-taking audiences, not to mention an existing concentration of First Nations performing arts programming.

Other perceived obstacles that are less tangible but equally significant include:

• tokenism, as indicated by the third of mainstream presenters that programmed only one Indigenous work in 2015
• concerns about the receptiveness of conservative audiences to the seriousness of themes in First Nations works
• fear of wrongly selecting, presenting, and marketing Indigenous works in the absence of those with lived experiences and/or cultural knowledge that might otherwise inform decision-making
• systemic racism, which manifests through discriminatory practices and programming decisions that favor dominant, Western cultural paradigms

Also worthy of note: although the majority of First Nations arts programming (59%) takes place in larger Australian cities, they represent only 2% of total performing arts in those cities. By contrast, these percentages are higher in remote and regional parts of Australia (7% and 3%, respectively), despite deep-seated racial tensions that may cause non-Indigenous audiences to be less receptive to such works. This section of “Showcasing Creativity”  offers a rich trove of qualitative data that paints a highly revealing picture of the race anxieties of Australian audiences and programmers alike. As one interviewee suggests, “Living in a very European community it is hard to get audiences to engage with Indigenous work. People see it as earnest, preachy and not fun.”

Multiple Pathways

What does all of this mean? Readers may recall Createquity’s August 2016 feature, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” which sifted through a number of visions that emerged throughout the decades-old history of cultural equity advocacy in the United States. The big takeaway was that the four distinct visions that were parsed out – diversity, prosperity, redistribution, and self-determination – were not mutually exclusive, as one often had implications for another, despite differences in desired outcomes.

It’s no coincidence, then, that “Showcasing Creativity” similarly suggests multiple pathways for addressing inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. One such pathway is the development of alternative presenting opportunities – such as Blak Lines, a touring initiative highlighted in the report that presents contemporary First Nations dance and theatre through a consortium of venues across Australia. This type of initiative – most aligned with the diversity vision for cultural equity, addressing homogeneity within mainstream institutions – holds promise in its ability to develop relationships between presenters, audiences, and Indigenous artists and communities, while providing leeway for targeted, localized marketing.

Another pathway might be increased opportunities for Indigenous people to help maintain creative control and integrity of First Nations works. As an example of the self-determination vision – which centers communities’ ownership of cultural life – this would include greater opportunities to involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in non-performer roles, where there is further underrepresentation. These include producer, technical, or administrative roles that often entail greater decision-making responsibilities.

There is also something to be said about how presenters find First Nations works. Nearly three-fourths of survey respondents indicated that prior relationships and peer networks with artists, producers, and community members are most important in this context. Similarly, in building capacity to deal with cultural sensitivities, peer-to-peer learning and long-term community engagement activities help to establish the meaningful relationships needed to foster in-depth, cross-cultural exchange. Ultimately, social networks and relationship building become central to addressing the intangible obstacles above.

“Showcasing Creativity” highlights the varying, simultaneous efforts needed to address cultural inequities, encouraging us to move away from any singular path and toward more coordination to effect and sustain infrastructure-wide change. The report’s section on barriers to programming First Nations work, in particular, offers a new and valuable contribution to the literature that is remarkable for its candor. As noted in this report, additional research about learning and training opportunities for technical and administrative roles might prove useful in understanding what barriers exist for Indigenous populations beyond performer roles. We would also love to see more research examining how these kinds of cross-cultural programming challenges play out in other national contexts.

the artist’s hand — photo by flickr user farhad sarykov

Expanding the reach of arts organizations is notoriously challenging, especially when it comes to people who make less money, have less education, and may identify as of lower class than the average museumgoer or dance enthusiast. Createquity readers know that cost isn’t the most important barrier preventing people of low socioeconomic status (SES) from engaging with the arts. In “Why Don’t They Come?” (WDTC), we noted that the rate of attendance at free performances actually increases as income and education levels go up.

Since that article was published last May, a few new resources have come to light addressing the question from different angles. Later in 2015, Colleen Dilenschneider of the market research firm IMPACTS shared additional data, including a proprietary survey of 48 cultural institutions, that take the conclusions from WDTC a step further. Dilenschneider shows that free admission days don’t help to engage underserved audiences; they appear to subvert cultural organizations’ intentions by attracting a higher-SES audience and more repeat visitors than non-free days. Ultimately, these misguided audience development strategies are potentially harmful to cultural organizations’ financial sustainability, since they may cannibalize memberships and ticket revenues without increasing long-term attendance.

Dilenschneider isn’t quite ready to give up on free admission entirely. She attributes these perverse effects in part to failed outreach, which she suspects tends to target existing patron or marketing bases, rather than using innovative ways to reach underserved audiences. Her posts on free admission don’t specify how that might work, but another source suggests that a better understanding of social class could provide a key.

In WDTC, we cited NEA research showing that people who self-identify as middle or upper class are much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identify as working class – even if you control for income and education. As it turns out, this holds widely: research shows that class and social status are strong predictors of cultural engagement broadly. It seems that one barrier stopping people from seeing your show may be that those people don’t see themselves as the kind of people who go in for art.

But new research conducted in England by sociologist Aaron Reeves (and ably summarized by Pacific Standard) shows that, when it comes to active participation in art-making specifically, as opposed to passive consumption of art at an exhibit or performance, class becomes irrelevant. He analyzed national survey data to investigate the correlation between arts participation and demographic indicators such as social class, social status, income, and education. He finds that active arts participation is strongly correlated with education, but not with social class or social status – and it is inversely correlated with income. It seems art-averse audiences who won’t visit your museum may be enthusiastic amateur artists in their spare time.

This result doesn’t come out of the blue for people who have been following research into demographics of participation in the “informal arts.” For example, arts participation data for California that we reviewed last summer revealed less dramatic differences across education and income for active participation than for attendance. What’s new here is the finding that, at least in England, class and status per se don’t matter at all to levels of engagement and that lower-income adults actually engage more when you isolate art-making.

The bad news for arts advocates is that, for art-making as for art consumption, education is still critical to shaping preferences. Reeves suggests a few possibilities as to why education might be a strong predictor of active arts participation in particular. Higher education may select for high-schoolers who have demonstrated a commitment to extracurricular arts (it’s another box to check on college applications); it may serve as an incubator for cultural activity (for instance, a few dorm-mates staging Othello on the quad); and, most mysteriously, it may increase one’s capacity to process information. (One potential cause we can eliminate is the helicopter parent: Reeves controlled for parental encouragement to participate in the arts). Whatever the reason, as long as access to education remains unequal, it is fair to predict that access to art-making – and even the desire to make art – will also be unequal. In that sense, there are plenty of potential artists who are underserved.

The good news is that Reeves’s sociological analysis offers insight into the challenge of engaging low-SES adults as cultural consumers. He discusses arts consumption as a status marker, symbol of group membership, and class-related lifestyle choice. High-SES adults may attend a performance or exhibit in part because they know that it will be seen as normal and even admirable or expected when they talk about it with their peers. More fundamentally, over time, their tastes may have been shaped by repeated conversations of this kind to become entirely unconscious. Low-SES adults may encounter different reactions if they try to discuss a museum show or dance piece with their peers; other kinds of cultural consumption or leisure-time activity may be normalized or admired instead. (Our current research suggests that television in particular may fill this role.)

Reeves does not go into great detail about this social mechanism of taste-formation, but his account offers a way to begin to understand why free admission alone doesn’t ignite the interest of poor and less-educated audiences. The idea of belongingness may be a crucial subjective barrier, which suggests that organizations need not only to work harder to reach those audiences in their marketing, as Dilenschneider argues, but also to think more about these social dynamics in shaping their marketing. How might we begin to make audiences feel welcome?

Well, what about tapping into the taste for art-making? Reeves’s study shows that performing or making art is less likely to be “re-appropriated as a status marker,” and thus less likely to be associated with social status than art consumption. But the line between the two is often porous: think of the easels you sometimes see set up in front of paintings in a museum. What might it look like to appeal to art enthusiasts who consider themselves working class through their love of art-making? It’s unclear how large a subset of that elusive audience this is, but it could be a starting point – especially for adults who have some education but low income.

There are two caveats to consider before taking all of this information at face value. First, class may work differently in the US than in England; while we have seen data that likewise shows a correlation between class and arts consumption in the United States, a study that examined the correlation between self-perceived class and active arts participation (not just consumption) using US data is currently missing from the literature and would provide useful information. Second, the survey Reeves analyzed included too few arts participants of color to be able to draw any conclusions about race; this raises questions about how well his findings apply on our side of the Atlantic, although it is worth noting that US data tends not to show race to be a major factor in overall arts participation choices once socioeconomic status is taken into account.

Regardless, we know that even when arts and cultural events are free, low-SES audiences still aren’t coming. Thinking harder about the social formation of taste may help the field design more effective tools for outreach – and engage a new swath of people more fully in a healthy arts ecosystem.

• People with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) participate at lower rates in a huge range of activities, including not just classical music concerts and plays, but also less “elitist” forms of engagement like going to the movies, dancing socially, and even attending sporting events.
• This is despite the fact that low-SES adults actually have more free time at their disposal, on average.
• Cost is a barrier for some low-SES individuals who want to participate in the arts, but not as many as you might think. If we could somehow make it so that low-SES adults were no more likely to decide not to attend an exhibit or performance because of cost than their more affluent peers, it would hardly change the socioeconomic composition of audiences at all.
• A major contrast to this dynamic is television. Ironically, the for-profit commercial TV industry is far more effective than our subsidized nonprofit arts organizations at engaging economically vulnerable members of our society. Not only do low-SES adults watch more TV, low-SES adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than low-SES adults who do.
• Where to go from here? We’d like to better understand why people make the choices they do before offering recommendations. At the very least, though, we can say that television should receive far more recognition than it does for its role in shaping the cultural lives of socioeconomically disadvantaged adults.

* * *

Less is More – photo by flickr user Arthur Cruz

On March 18, the Empire finale aired on Fox. The two-hour episode was seen – on TV, in real time – by more than 17 million viewers nationwide. An estimated 50% of all African American households tuned in. In February, the New York City Ballet sold out its 2,500 seat house for three “Art Series” performances, as is typical of this series. (Each ticket, regardless of location, was priced at $29.) Last July, bachata star Romeo Santos sold out two nights at Yankee Stadium, performing for more than 100,000 people. (Two thirds of the tickets cost more than $100.) During the 2013-14 season, the Metropolitan Opera transmitted ten operas via satellite into some 2,000 theaters in 66 countries, including more than 800 in the U.S. Box office numbers hit $60 million worldwide. (Average ticket prices were $23.) Last summer, some 90,000 people put at least $300 and four full days (to say nothing of accommodation costs and travel time) towards attending Bonnaroo, the Tennessee rock/pop music festival. More than half of those attending came from farther afield than “the south.”

With statistics like these, it’s hard not to come away with the impression that “the arts” – from ballet to Bonnaroo – are alive and kicking, well-attended and avidly consumed by every demographic imaginable. A closer look at the data, however, surfaces evidence that individuals of low socioeconomic status (“low-SES”) – generally defined in our reading as those with at most a high school education and in the bottom half of the income distribution in the United States – consume the arts at a much lower rate than their more affluent counterparts. The latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) in the United States shows that in 2012, probability of arts attendance tracked closely with level of formal education: college graduates were more than two and a half times as likely to attend a so-called “benchmark” arts event in 2012 as those with no more than a high school education. Looking at income levels shows a similar correlative relationship: those earning between $20,000 and $50,000, who make up one-third of the US population, made up just a quarter of 2012 benchmark arts audiences in 2012. Statistics from the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands tell a similar story.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012.”

Historically, research into the demographics of arts consumption has used a rather narrow lens to define “the arts.” The NEA’s benchmark arts activities, which have been measured in every edition of the survey since 1982, include only live attendance at ballet, opera, musical and nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, museums, and galleries. However, the most recent edition of the SPPA makes clear that it’s not just benchmark activities that are at issue. Data from the survey shows that fewer low-income individuals attend pop and rock concerts than their wealthier counterparts, and significantly fewer of them attend visual arts festivals and craft fairs. In fact, people with lower incomes and less education are less likely to read books, go to the movies, take an arts class, play a musical instrument, sing, dance socially, take or edit photographs, paint, make scrapbooks, engage in creative writing, or make crafts.

All told, the data paints a consistent portrait of lower participation by low-SES adults in a breathtaking range of visual, performing, literary, and film activities. While this definition of “arts” doesn’t include everything (more on this later), it is broad enough, and the differences of sufficient magnitude, to be cause for significant concern. If those differences reflect disparities of access to more “common” arts experiences like participating regularly as an audience member, they represent a significant challenge to Createquity’s conception of a healthy arts ecosystem. When large numbers of people face barriers to participating in the arts in the way they might want to, we know that we’re missing opportunities to improve people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways. What’s really behind this phenomenon of lower participation rates among economically disadvantaged people? And what can, and should, we do about it?

THE PRICE IS TOO DAMN HIGH (OR IS IT?)

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts published “When Going Gets Tough,” a report that for the first time offers extensive insight into the reasons why people do or do not attend arts events. Drawing from a special cultural participation module within the 2012 General Social Survey (GSS), the survey asked respondents whether they had attended an exhibit or performance in the past year, and if not, why not. More than half of respondents had indeed attended at least one exhibit or performance during that time, and another 13% shared that they had wanted to go but decided not to for whatever reason. The report refers to this latter group as “interested non-attendees.”

The most common factor keeping people away from arts experiences, cited by nearly half of interested non-attendees, was that they “could not find the time.” This makes sense: before ponying up for a three-day festival in Tennessee or a five-hour opera, we first have to decide if we can afford the hours.

But while lack of time is undoubtedly an obstacle for many, it does not disproportionately affect lower-income and working class respondents. “When Going Gets Tough” notes that “not being able to find the time, including due to work conflicts, is increasingly mentioned…at higher incomes. [Only] 31% of those in the lowest income quartile mention time constraints, compared with 53% of those in higher income quartiles.” While perhaps surprising, this finding is not isolated to the arts: the phenomenon of less perceived time at higher incomes is well documented in the literature. According to Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee’s analysis of time use datasets from several countries for their cheekily-titled study “Stressed out on Four Continents: Time Crunch or Yuppie Kvetch?,” “complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from well-off families.”

Is this just a matter of perception? Do low-SES individuals feel less time-poor only because time pales in importance to other barriers they face? In fact, the preponderance of evidence suggests that low-SES people really do have more time at their disposal on average. According to a longitudinal study of time-use data by Almudena Sevilla, Jose I. Gimenez-Nadal, and Jonathan Gershuny, discretionary time has increased for all Americans over the last fifty years, and while hours of leisure time were once fairly equal across education levels, low-SES people have since enjoyed dramatic gains. By their estimation, low-SES men with at most a high school education have gained an hour more than their college-educated peers during that time; the corresponding differential for women is 3.4 hours.

Bottom line: all signs point to low-SES people having relatively more free time at their disposal and lower rates of arts attendance than their high-SES counterparts. That would seem to offer pretty strong evidence against the notion that time constraints are the primary factor keeping this demographic away from live performances and exhibits.

* * *

What about cost? For decades, our field has offered free concerts, outreach programs, and other engagement efforts that all rest on an assumption that the price of admission is a barrier to arts consumption for low-SES individuals. Taken literally, that assumption is supported by data from “When Going Gets Tough,” which indicates that cost was a barrier for nearly 40% of interested non-attendees. While the report itself does not go into detail on the extent to which cost is felt as a barrier across income strata, our own analysis of the underlying survey data indicates that low-SES individuals are indeed more likely to mention cost. Among interested non-attendees, 43% of people in the lowest income quartile were not able to attend an exhibit or performance because of cost, compared to 30% of folks in the highest quartile. Viewed through the lens of education, the difference is even more dramatic: those who had progressed no further than high school were almost twice as likely to see cost as an obstacle than respondents with a bachelor’s degree.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey. ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture

Looking at the motivations of people who did attend arts events, we see a similar dynamic. Adults in the lowest quartile of household income were twice as likely as those in the highest quartile to indicate that low cost or free admission was critical to their decision to attend an event. Even at events that were free for everyone, 29% of low-SES attendees said that low (or no) cost was a major reason for their attendance, versus 17% of those in the top income quartile.

So the way to get everyone participating in the arts is to invest more in free events and outreach programs to underserved populations, right? Not so fast. While it is clear that cost does affect the ability of some low-SES adults to engage with the arts, or at least live exhibits and performances, it’s not at all clear that removing cost as a barrier would make that much of a difference.

Consider this: “When Going Gets Tough” reports that there is only a 6 percentage-point gap between the lowest and highest income quartile for those who had free admission to the most recent arts exhibit they’d attended (64% in the lowest income quartile vs. 58% in the highest income quartile). While the difference in attendance at free performances is more pronounced in the GSS data, the most recent SPPA survey tells a different story: the rate of arts attendance at free music, theater, or dance performances actually increases as income and education levels go up. Moreover, this phenomenon has been observed in arts research going back at least half a century. For their seminal early 1960s investigation of cultural economics, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen surveyed more than 30,000 attendees at 160 events in the US and UK and found that not a single free performance was able to draw an audience that was more than 10% “blue-collar.”

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012.”

Admittedly, we don’t know the whole story here. Perhaps affluent adults are more likely to hear about free events, or have relationships with people who can get them free tickets. And even “free” is not necessarily free, if it still costs money to get to the location or pay for child care. Whatever the reasons, though, the data suggests that simply offering a free option is not sufficient for arts institutions to ensure a socioeconomically representative audience. In our own analysis of the survey data from which “When Going Gets Tough” was sourced, we modeled a scenario in which low-SES people were no more likely to face cost as a barrier in attending an exhibit or performance than their high-SES counterparts. Roughly speaking, this simulates what would happen if every exhibit and performance in existence could be attended for free. The result? Only 7% of the chasm in attendance rates between rich and poor, and between college-educated and not, would be bridged.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey via ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture, author analysis

“When Going Gets Tough” does find one other barrier to access that’s correlated with income: ease of getting to the venue. According to the report, “44 percent of adults in the lowest income quartile said the exhibit or performance was too difficult to get to….In contrast, only 24 percent of those in the highest income quartile mentioned this issue.” Yet, like cost, this factor on its own is not enough to explain the disparity. Indeed, according to our model, even if all barriers to participation were removed for low-SES populations and every person who wanted to attend an exhibit or performance in the past year were able to do so, it would still not close even half of the gap in attendance rates.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey via ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture, author analysis

Clearly, there is something else going on. If none of these barriers fully explain the low participation rates among the socioeconomically disadvantaged, what else is keeping them away?

ARTS VS. THE TUBE (MIND THE GAP)

Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem imagines a world in which “each human being today and in the future has an opportunity to participate in the arts at a level appropriate to his/her interest and skill” (emphasis added). Our concern about disparities of access to the arts stems from the potential for life circumstances to interfere with such choices. The revelations in this research, however, suggest that there is a significant proportion of economically disadvantaged people who do not take the initiative to experience the arts, even when time and cost are not issues.

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, “When Going Gets Tough”

Our analysis of the GSS data underlying “When Going Gets Tough” shows that a lack of explicit interest is far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events. Just under a third of the overall sample neither attended an exhibit or performance in the past year nor could recall one they wanted to attend but couldn’t. Among the bottom income quartile, however, this number was nearly half – and for people who hadn’t finished high school, it was over 65%!

Amid the litany of arts-related activities for which participation correlates with increased income and higher education, one notable exception looms large. Aside from eating, television is about as close to a universal American pastime as exists today. A whopping 93% of us spend time in front of the tube on a typical day, according to the GSS, and nearly 97% of American households own a TV set. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s American Time Use Survey (ATUS), watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time (2.8 hours per day) in 2013, accounting for more than half of leisure time for those age 15 and over. John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey in “Busyness as Usual” show that television consumption has increased dramatically in recent decades across all populations, noting that TV has eaten up six of the eight hours of the discretionary hours we’ve gained on average since 1965.

While almost everyone watches television, it turns out that low-SES people watch more than most. A closer look at the Time Use Survey numbers shows that individuals with less than a high school diploma spent 3.77 hours per weekday watching TV in 2013, almost double the TV hours consumed by those with a bachelor’s degree and higher. What’s more, these less-educated individuals spent twice as much time consuming television as on all other leisure activities combined–including reading, socializing and communicating, sports and exercise, relaxing, and playing computer games.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the spending patterns captured in the BLS’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. Although individuals in the top income quintile spend only a little bit more of their budgets on “entertainment” on the whole than those on the bottom (5% vs. 4%), the distribution within this amount is quite different. In the lowest income quintile, more than half of spending goes to “audio and visual equipment and services” (which presumably includes TVs), while just over a tenth goes to “fees and admissions.” The top bracket, by contrast, spends more on fees and admissions than on A/V equipment and services.

It seems likely that quite a few low-SES adults are essentially substituting television for other forms of engagement with the arts and entertainment. Our analysis of GSS data offers strong evidence to support this hypothesis. It turns out that even within low-SES groups, a lack of expressed interest in attending an exhibit or performance over the past year correlates with more hours spent watching TV. Whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, it seems the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Source: 2012 General Social Survey. ICPSR National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture

Is that something to be worried about? At least one group of researchers argues that it is. In their previously-mentioned study on leisure inequality, Sevilla et al. find that in contrast to previously mentioned increases in the quantity of leisure time, the quality of leisure time has declined across the board for people at all income levels, with an especially steep decline in leisure quality for low-SES individuals. In other words, even though low-SES individuals have experienced the greatest increase in number of discretionary hours since 1965, they have also experienced the greatest decline in the “quality” of how those hours are spent, as measured by their relative levels of different types of leisure. Sevilla et al. see increased TV watching as a prime culprit behind this decrease in leisure time quality, as watching TV is a passive, one-way communication medium that doesn’t require the presence of others.

On the other hand, TV is relatively cheap for the quantity of programming available and can be delivered on demand via devices we likely already own. And in the midst of what many are calling a new golden age of television, claims on the part of egghead researchers about “low-quality” leisure time might ring hollow to the folks who tune in every day.

(MAYBE) THEY’RE JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

The truth is that we don’t know much about why low-SES people make the choices they do about how to spend their free time. Are they watching television because they truly enjoy it and happen to find it more fulfilling than going out to a concert, a museum, or a movie theater? Or are they doing so as a reluctant concession to circumstance, with TV being the only art form they can afford to consume (or the only one they don’t have to schedule in advance)? Or perhaps something in between – a “learned” and socially reinforced preference that has as much to do with identity as anything specific to the experience itself?

“When Going Gets Tough” offers some support for the last of these propositions. Survey respondents who self-identified as middle or upper class were much more likely to attend an exhibit or performance than those who identified as working class. This finding held even after controlling for income and education:

For example, among individuals whose household income was around the national median, approximately 60% identified as working class and 36% as middle class. Despite having very similar household incomes, only 48% of those identifying as working class attended at least one exhibit or performance, compared with 67% who identified as middle class.

Perhaps some low-SES individuals don’t attend arts events simply because they don’t think of themselves as the “kind of people” who attend arts events. Which brings us back to the question: is that a problem?

Art Gallery – photo by flickr user LWYang

We would urge would-be social engineers to tread carefully when it comes to deciding for poor people what their consumption preferences should be. (An instructive example here is the movement in New York City and elsewhere to reduce soda consumption, which has faced pushback from the very low-income communities it’s intended to help.) How far can one go to increase participation by underrepresented audiences before those efforts stop being perceived as generous and start coming off as patronizing? Until we know more about low-SES people’s subjective experience of their free time — whether they would spend their time differently if they had the opportunity, and whether there’s a place for the arts in those dreams — we advise against making too many assumptions.

There is a rich irony lurking just beneath the surface here: television, a largely for-profit commercial industry, routinely does a much better job engaging the most economically vulnerable members of our population than our supposedly charitable nonprofit arts institutions that receive tens of billions of dollars annually in government-sanctioned subsidy. As TV becomes increasingly untethered from broadcast networks and big cable channels and increasingly experienced on laptops and handheld devices, the nonprofit arts sector would do well to let go of its historical marginalization of the small screen. For better or worse, television is a powerful cultural force, and ignoring it is no longer tenable in an era of increased attention to cultural equity and community relevance.

BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

In the meantime, however, let’s not forget that we have identified one constituency that is clearly suffering under the status quo. More than 45% of low-SES adults who were interested in participating in an exhibit or performance over a 12-month period did not do so because of cost – a figure that is more than 10 percentage points higher than their high-SES counterparts. According to our analysis of the GSS data, roughly 1-1.5 million people in the United States over the age of 18 fall into this gap. Not only does cost of attendance matter more for low-SES individuals and families with less discretionary income, with income inequality in the United States exploding, the number of people who face economic barriers to their desired level of participation in the arts is likely to multiply if current trends continue. And remember that these numbers apply only to exhibits and performances, but there are lower rates of participation by low-income and less-educated adults in numerous other activities as well, including going to the movies and many types of art-making and arts learning. The SPPA even reports that the same education and income correlations we’ve been talking about apply when it comes to attending a sporting event, playing sports, and physical exercise. It’s likely that cost limits the ability of low-income and less-educated individuals to participate in all of these to some extent.

While it’s not surprising to see lower participation by socioeconomically disadvantaged adults in arts activities that they perceive as too expensive, it’s important to keep that gap in perspective. Our investigation has uncovered evidence that although this problem is real, it directly impacts the choices of a much smaller number of people than we might have guessed. As we continue our core research process at Createquity, we’ll be looking to understand better why poor people and those who have not attended college seem much less likely to even be interested in participating in the arts, as well as weigh this particular disparity of access alongside others that we have yet to examine closely or even identify. We look forward to sharing what we find.