Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

Happy holiday season! The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with another installment of the Createquity podcast, this time highlighting different perspectives on how to approach the issue of cultural equity.

In surveying the history of the movement for cultural equity, it became apparent to Createquity researchers that the term itself can mean many different things to different people, often simultaneously. Understanding these diverse perspectives can help us have a more honest and meaningful conversation about what it is that we collectively want to achieve. In this series, we take a look at four different visions of success for cultural equity, and consider several real-life examples of how pursuing these visions of success has played out in practice.

This follows our previous podcast: Is Television Bad For Us?

Episode 1:

Guest Fari Nzinga (bio below) discusses the framework Createquity has developed to understand the concept of cultural equity.

(Click here to listen to the episode if you’re reading this via email.)

Episode 2:

Guest Denise Saunders Thompson (bio below) talks about how she has approached cultural equity on a practical level in her work in the arts sector and in academia.

(Click here to listen to the episode if you’re reading this via email.)

The Host

E. Andrew Taylor, Host
Andrew Taylor thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC, he shares what he learns at “The Artful Manager.”

Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

Happy fall television premiere week! The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with a third installment of the Createquity podcast, with a new series on television and our wellbeing.

Public conversations about television and the arts have tended to pit one against the other. If television wasn’t saving the arts by connecting them to a wide and public audience, it was killing them by advancing popular culture over ‘serious’ fare. While some celebrated the arts on television as encouraging live attendance, others worried it discouraged such attendance by serving as a substitute. From a public health standpoint, we can also be concerned by research associating heavy television-watching with conditions like obesity and early death — would we be both healthier and happier attending and participating in “traditional” art forms rather than staying home in front of the television?

Even in the age of digital communications — of broadcast and cable and wifi, oh my — we often miss the larger conversation about the box: television is culture. It conveys visual and narrative human expression, it employs and animates artists, reaches a massive audience every day, and it can even be a tool for social change. And — spoiler alert— people really enjoy watching television…a lot of television.

So what are the implications of “television as culture?” And how do they frame and inform the trajectory of artists, arts organizations, audiences, and all the others supporting and advancing artistic work? These episodes will explore the scope, scale, sources, and substance of contemporary television; consider its social, civic, and health effects; and discover it as a medium where artists and audiences find each other and even as a vehicle for artist and youth empowerment.

This follows our previous podcast: The Cost of Being Creative.

Episode 1:

Guest Louise Geraghty (bio below) provides a quick rundown of the research Createquity has done on this topic. Hear about the impact television may have on our personal health and happiness. Is heavy TV watching in the same category as soda/junk food when it comes to possibly needing some regulation?

(Click here to listen to the episode if you’re reading this via email.)

Episode 2:

Guest Qui Nguyen (bio below) talks to us about his experience in both the theatre and television worlds. Hear about how he feels the two industries interact and impact the health of the overall arts industry. Can television be a stable and even desirable form of employment for creative artists?

(Click here to listen to the episode if you’re reading this via email.)

Episode 3:

Guest Rebecca Yenawine (bio below) explains how she uses television media to engage low-socioeconomic-status youth in the Baltimore area. Hear about the impact she feels media has on the health of our communities.

(Click here to listen to the episode if you’re reading this via email.)

The Host

E. Andrew Taylor, Host
Andrew Taylor thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC, he shares what he learns at “The Artful Manager.”

Around the world, we see people facing challenges not only accessing careers as artists, but also sustaining them. South Korean artists make 77% and Canadian artists 74% of their respective countries’ average income. In Ireland, 80% of visual artists who depend on their creative income live in poverty. One survey respondent in that country describes the outlook for artists this way: “The future always looks worse than the past. Economic booms are quite bad for artists, because they can’t afford to live where they should for their careers. Busts are worse.”

Generally, people born into less affluence have to work harder to catch up in any field. The Guardian’s Sonia Sodha writes that “we’ll never be able to eliminate the role that good fortune plays, but we need to do much more to lessen its influence and increase the relationship between effort and success.” What role can government play in lessening the influence of fortune when it comes to supporting artists? A look at several countries gives us some clues.

Tran Thi Doanh, Vietnames painter – Photo by Flickr user, Duc

Two Models: National Status vs. Sink or Swim

In some countries, including the United States, being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean having a professional artist career track, especially not in any sort of state-sponsored system. As one national study of artists reported, “some painters interviewed said that career was not part of their professional vocabulary; they simply were painters.” In that context, as we’ve explored, many US-based artists have day jobs and backup plans, and find themselves crossing between nonprofit and commercial sectors in a demanding market economy.

In other parts of the world such as in the former Soviet Union, as scholar Nina Dimitrialdi describes in her 2009 PhD dissertation on challenges faced by US and UK artists, “artist” was indeed a profession just like any other. An artist in the Russian Federation with “professional” status from the government currently receives compulsory social programs such as insurance covering illness, housing, maternity, disability, and retirement. Many countries with cultural sectors based on the old Soviet model, such as Egypt, fully bankroll training programs and manage “card carrying” artists and their benefits through a national union.

Left: Egypt’s High Institute of Ballet, 2013 (conditions under Presidents Mubarak, Mansour and Morsi) | Right: Same facility in 2016 (under President el-Sisi) – Images by Shawn Lent and Madga Saleh

Whether or not artistry is a formal profession in the eyes of the state, and what states do or don’t do to support that profession, reflects different agendas within different political systems. While the American model mostly distributes public funding for the arts indirectly, via tax deductions for nonprofit organizations and their donors, many other governments provide substantial direct support to individual artists. Increased overall government funding for the arts could be an important indicator of potential support for economically disadvantaged artists, but there is an opportunity in cultural policy to assess what funding schemes help bridge wealth gaps in the profession.

Unfortunately, we found existing research on this topic to cover predominantly North American and European countries, with few nationally representative results relating to artists from poorer backgrounds. While it is difficult to get a good read on the situation internationally, in many parts of the world, it does appear that dedicated government support – in the forms of subsidies and other incentives – has opened the artistic profession to more people across social classes.

Europe Day Slovenia – Photo by Flickr user, Steve

Public Policy Can Keep Artists Afloat

We see a number of countries enacting support programs for artists that are tied in with their tradition of centralized social services, supporting the basic needs of all citizens; this could be critical for artists and similar types of workers. As Quartz’s Aimee Groth put it when speaking about entrepreneurs, “when basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative.” By giving more of a safety net to artists born with less means, government programs can make it easier for people (artists included) to risk being “entrepreneurial.”

Slovenia, Finland, Italy and Austria are a few of the many countries that offer pension and retirement programs to deserving artists as defined by those governments. The South Korean Artists Welfare Act extends the country’s employment insurance to 180,000 artists and accident insurance to 57,000 artists. The Danish Arts Foundation’s life-long benefit grants (livsvarige statsydelser) are awarded to state-selected, high-achieving artists in that country. In Thailand artists employed by the Ministry of Culture are considered civil service officers with the same salary system and benefits, and in Germany, the Artists’ Social Insurance Fund (Künstlersozialkasse or KSK) has been supporting self-employed artists and journalists since 1983.

2009 Making an appointment with Sabine Schlüter, head of KSK (Künstlersozialkasse) – Photo by Flickr user, Henning Krause

Estonia

Another country advancing its support of artists is Estonia, where a select group of artists and writers are offered a €1005 salary per month for two years plus health insurance and a pension plan. According to Indrek Saar, Estonia’s Minister of Culture, “the purpose of [the program] is to offer for a couple of years a possibility to work in peace and social guarantees for the distinguished creative people. Economic stability of a creative person gives better preconditions to create a new work of art.” This year Saar announced a 13.5% raise to the minimum wage for cultural professionals in that country’s government. This program is quite similar to one in Sweden, where income guarantees are given to selected artists who have created work considered “important for Swedish cultural life.”

Netherlands

The Netherlands has historically been a strong leader in this realm. The Dutch Artists’ Work and Income Scheme Act (WWIK), in place from 2005-2012, was the third major artist subsidy program developed for the country. WWIK provided financial support (70-125% of the guaranteed minimum income) for artists with a low income for a maximum of 48 months over 10 years to cover the start-up period of their professional arts career. Dutch artists also received extensions in the availability of unemployment benefits (4 years rather than 6 months).

While that program did not track impact for artists from financial disadvantage, another example from the Dutch attempted to connect cause and effect. From the 1960s-80s, the Netherlands provided temporary assistance to low-income visual artists that allowed those artists to sell their work directly to local governments as a supplement to income. The number of participating artists increased from 200 in 1960 to 3800 in 1983. During the same period, the growth rate of student enrollment in fine arts departments at Dutch academies was 60% higher than the average growth rate for technical and vocational training in other fields.

Members of Ethiopia’s Ras Theatre group dance and play as they wait for Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni at Bole Airport, Addis Ababa – Photo by Flickr user, Andrew Heavens

The Warning: Selling Out (or Buying In) for Survival

Governments sponsor artists for a complex set of purposes: cultural tourism like the kind Russia is planning in occupied Crimea; income generation or nationalism such as with the Agencia Cubana de Rap in Cuba; protecting the national image like in Vietnam; “preserving the country’s national cultural assets for the benefit of all citizens and future generations” including aboriginal arts like in Canada; binational collaboration such as that of China-Moldova; cultural diplomacy, placemaking, or improving public morale. Generally speaking, state-sponsored artists are expected to adhere to policies that align with national interests.

2013 Venice Biennale / Maldives Pavilion – Photo by Flickr user, Emergency Room Thierry

Before we all make a rush on the Dutch consulate or start demanding new state-sponsored artist programs in our respective countries – quite the issue to float in our current political climate – it’s worth considering the pitfalls that can come with increased government involvement in the arts.

• Threats to Freedom of Speech: Several of the programs mentioned above are or were careful to allow artistic freedom. The Netherlands supported the artists participating in its assistance programs regardless of the style or content of the work they produced. In Estonia, Minister Saar explains that artists receiving the government salaries are “still free in their creative work; the only requirement for the creative person is the commitment to one’s creative work.” Unfortunately, such freedoms are the exception rather than the rule. Many countries, such as Zimbabwe, have a national agency for censorship. While increased government support for artists can result in great technical rigor in the respective art forms, like in Russian ballet, it can also mean stringent restrictions on artistic expression and a high level of government interference. In 1980, UNESCO recommended governments “determine those remunerative jobs which might be confided to artists without restricting their creativity, their vocation and their freedom of expression and communication.” Russia may recognize artistry as a “profession,” but its track record with creative expression is abysmal; the organization Freemuse registered 32 attacks on artistic freedom in that country (such as censorship, imprisonment, physical attack, and death) in 2015 alone.
• Questions of Scale and Dysfunction: Government funding artists doesn’t automatically result in a net benefit for all individual artists, let alone poor artists. Many of the programs we came across focused on a relatively small number of superstars. Can any of these programs run at the scale needed to address the flaws in our arts ecology? And at what point might increased scale mean increased risk of corruption? Would an international scheme across the sector be more effective than relying on individual polities?
• Risk of Perpetuating Cultural Inequities and the Residual Effects of Colonialism: We have been examining government programs from the perspective of reducing socioeconomic inequality in the arts ecosystem, but in fact artists who are LGBTQ, with disabilities, from marginalized racial or religious groups, or political opposition may be just as likely to be excluded from government programs in many countries. With decision-making about which artists to cultivate via government sponsored programs so centralized, states have few incentives to include groups that may be at odds with perceived government interests.
• Risk of Servile Labor: Similar concerns apply to arts disciplines and new forms of self-expression. If you pursue a career as a painter of socialist realism art because the government only supports and allows that form of art, then there are fewer opportunities for you to express yourself and for audiences to gain benefits from a variety of artistic expressions. Artists in North Korea have been exported to execute massive arts projects in countries such as Cambodia, hired as employees to earn hard currency for the State.
• Lack of Cultural Variety: Even when a government’s intentions are pure, it is not clear that placing decisions about artists’ careers in the hands of bureaucrats leads to the best possible mix of cultural products and experiences. Generous benefits for artists in all likelihood means a limit on the number of artists who can access those benefits, which may mean that the people left out have even fewer opportunities to have a public creative identity and get paid for it. For all its issues, the United States’s market approach is rarely criticized for yielding a boring, homogeneous mix of work.

National Ballet of China ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ – Photo by Flickr user, Jesse Clockwork

Government policies can make it possible for artists to pursue better, more dignified careers, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. As we move forward in addressing the questions of support and equal opportunity in arts careers, we must be conscious of the tradeoffs inherent in systems that rely on more overt government or other patronage of the arts.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Cover image: “Radical – Avant la Tempête @ EDLD 2015,” courtesy of Flickr user, Duc, via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

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.

• Television is America’s national pastime. Adults spend an average of nearly three hours in front of the tube daily, outpacing the next most common leisure-time activity by a factor of four.
• There is surprisingly robust evidence suggesting TV watching may contribute to poor physical and cognitive health; when it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, however, the verdict is still out.
• Are people consciously choosing TV over other activities? There’s not a lot of evidence one way or another, but it doesn’t seem like most adults who watch large amounts of TV are doing so reluctantly.
• The arts are not the (obvious) antidote. People who attend exhibits and performances are no more likely to report being satisfied with their lives than those who don’t.
• We value adults’ freedom to make their own choices, so will need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing before committing to a case for change.

* * *

TV Slave – photo by flickr user Manuele Carra

In 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama broke the internet with “Turnip for What,” a vine promo for her Let’s Move! campaign. She’s appeared on the Biggest Loser. She has her own viral dance sensation–the #GimmeFive, performed to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk. (You know it, right?) And she’s encouraging Americans to drink more water through fun social media stunts that appeal to our egos (hello, John Legend) and a line of chic accessories from the likes of J. Crew and Rebecca Minkoff. (Not to be outdone, POTUS and VPOTUS have been known to run around the White House and drink water, too.)

No, she’s not trying to be the next pop star. (Though we would totally buy her record.) She has a mission, and that’s to stem the obesity epidemic in the United States. The situation is, by all accounts, dire: 17% of children and almost 35% of adults are currently considered obese, and those numbers are worse among individuals with lower incomes and less education (so-called “low-SES” populations). Almost one in eleven adults has type 2 diabetes, and many more have prediabetes. Obesity is bad for our wallet: the US spends an estimated $147 billion in obesity-related healthcare expenses annually. It’s bad for the environment, too: cars are burning nearly a billion more gallons of gasoline a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.

FLOTUS is but one character in the ongoing obesity saga. The Food and Drug Administration appeared in 2014 with new rules requiring establishments to post the calorie content of food on their menus. It went even further in 2015, when it required front-of-package labeling. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg led a movement in New York to reduce soda consumption by limiting the sale of jumbo sugary drinks, which re-ignited the debate around the so-called sin tax. For more than a decade, public schools have battled youth junk food consumption with all sorts of methods: removing vending machines, imposing strict guidelines for school nutrition, and the Hail Mary move of banning birthday cupcakes.

Let’s Move Day – photo by flickr user Phil Roeder

The junk food hullabaloo raises interesting questions about choice, and whether individuals can or do make good choices for themselves. Here, the work of leading psychologists, economists and neuroscientists provides useful context: it is now widely accepted that most people make sense of the world by simplifying it, and the ways our brains are wired to simplify things can cause us to make judgments that are contrary to our best interests. There are a few reasons we might tend towards the simplify trap: hyperbolic discounting, which is our tendency to value immediate pleasure (or pain) over future consequences; loss aversion, or the fact that we dislike losing more than we like winning, which can make us risk-averse; or our tendency to focus only on what we know and what’s familiar. The combination of these factors makes low-risk, familiar propositions offering immediate satisfaction very hard to turn down. If we grew up with juice boxes and oreos as a school snack, and the closest grocer is a corner bodega stocked with chips and soda, and, well, sugar and salt and fat are so good, then of course we’d reach for cookies over carrots.

At this point, dear reader, you might be wondering why we have spent the first four paragraphs of an article about television and the arts talking about obesity. Well, as it turns out, TV (probably) makes you fat too.

TUNE IN, DROP OUT

Jamie K. is a 36-year-old from Fort Wayne, IN. She has a GED, and is unemployed. She likes to make jewelry and work on home improvement projects in her free time, which isn’t much, since she has three teenagers. She doesn’t go to arts events, because she doesn’t “have friends that are cultured, and it’s hard to go to things that [she] would find interesting by [herself].” She actively watches 10 hours of TV a day. Sonja B., a 57-year-old from Chicago, IL who is also unemployed, doesn’t attend arts events because they are usually in the evening, and she “wouldn’t want to go by [herself.]” She works out, and watches an average of 15 hours of TV, daily. Shantell T. is a 33-year-old administrative assistant from Washington DC. She watches 12 hours of TV on a typical day, and doesn’t consider herself to be a very “artsy” person.

In May of 2015, Createquity published Why Don’t They Come?, the first of many deep dives into the question of disparities of access to the benefits of the arts. The article looked closely at arts participation patterns among poor and less educated individuals, and considered obstacles to attendance including logistical reasons, such as cost and access to transportation or childcare, as well as other factors like feeling excluded and not having a friend to take along. (It is worth noting that many of the logistical reasons cited as obstacles to arts attendance are barriers to healthy eating as well. Cost and access in particular are blamed with the widening food gap between rich and poor.)

What we discovered in the course of our research surprised us. While the aforementioned obstacles were certainly barriers, a lack of explicit interest was far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events.

That’s What You Think – photo by flickr user Robert Couse-Baker

Of all these statistics, one in particular stood out to us. Virtually alone among the activities we studied, television attracted more participation from poor and less educated adults rather than less. And on top of that, our analysis of GSS data suggested that even within low-SES groups, adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than those who do. It seems possible that, whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Given the tendency to be distrustful of television, we were curious: are people going to be worse off on average watching TV instead of engaging in other, potentially more enriching, activities? Should this be an area of concern for our work here at Createquity? Is there an opportunity here to improve wellbeing through the arts?

SMALL SCREEN, BIG CONSEQUENCES

“It’s kind of a waste,” admits one of our interviewees. “I’m not really doing anything when I’m sitting and watching TV.”

As it turns out, sitting and not really doing anything when you’re watching TV doesn’t bode well for your physical wellbeing. There is compelling evidence that increased hours spent watching television is associated with obesity, in part because of the sedentary lifestyle it promotes by crowding out time that could be spent on exercise. SA Bowman looked at data from the USDA’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII), and found that men and women across demographic groups, including race, income, and educational status, were more likely to be overweight as their average hours of television viewing per day increased. Women who watched more than two hours of TV per day were 41.4% more likely to be obese than women who watch less than one hour a day. For men, that figure was 90.29%. And it’s not just sitting that’s the problem: even among healthy Australian adults who exercise at least 2.5 hours per week, watching TV is straight up bad for the waistline, with more hours watching TV per day was associated with increased blood pressure, waistline, and cholesterol levels. (Note 2)

Research has indicated that TV affects physical health in other ways as well⏤even to the point of shortening your lifespan. One team’s analysis of the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset reveals that each hour of TV watched per day is associated with a 4% increase in mortality risk, amounting to an overall reduction of 1.2 years in total life expectancy due to television viewing in the US. A 2010 paper found an increased likelihood of all causes of mortality with more than 2 hours of television watched per day. Yet a third paper finds that, compounding psychological factors aside, TV may lend itself to an increased likelihood of smoking (and we all know where the shoe drops there).

Watching Zoolander – photo by flickr user Vincent Diamante

Are you doing some math in your head? (Your Favorite TV Shows x Total Viewing Hours) / Hours Watched Daily = Life Expectancy Reduction and Loss of Cognition? We did some math too, because there’s more to the brain than cognition. We ran a regression analysis on television and wellbeing using data from the 2012 General Social Survey. After controlling for variables including health, income level, education level, gender, age, and the frequency with which people interact with their friends and relatives, we found that increased hours of watching television is negatively associated with overall life satisfaction for people in the top three income quartiles, albeit only by a little bit. (Interestingly, we did not an association between television viewing and happiness for people with household incomes less than $25,000 per year). With a small sample and effect size and no ability to infer the direction of causality, we have to be careful not to push these results too far. Still, this descriptive analysis doesn’t do the case for TV any favors.

Others have investigated the relationship between watching a lot of television and one’s overall satisfaction with life (sometimes framed or referred to by scientists as subjective wellbeing). In their analysis of individual responses to the World Values Survey, which includes data from 80 countries, researchers Luigino Bruni and Luca Stanca found that television “crowds out” other, more social, activities–such as volunteering or spending time with friends and family–that are associated with higher life satisfaction. In the same study, they also suggest that increased hours spent watching television causes people to want higher incomes, which in turn creates unhappiness and low life satisfaction. According to Bruni and Stanca, TV is a part of a “relational treadmill” that induces people to measure their increase in happiness against that of their neighbors, instead of against their own experiences. Television, they argue, makes people want to consume more, inspired by both advertising and program content; unfortunately, by this metric, individuals will never achieve a real increase in happiness that corresponds to their increase in buying power. Some take issue with the way Bruni and Stanca classified countries in their methodology (see here), and at least one set of researchers note that when considering heterogeneity within countries, people who watch television report higher levels of wellbeing than people who do not watch any television at all. Still, we likely can all point to an example of being sucked into the “relational treadmill” of consumption thanks to TV.

TV and your brain: Turin street art – photo by flickr user mermaid

THE TWIST

You would think with all this talk of obesity, mortality, and dissatisfaction with life, people would reach for the off button. The fact that they don’t suggests they must be getting something out of it.

Could it just be that people who watch large amounts of TV lack self-control? That could explain some of these findings; for example, there is research that indicates unhappy people in general tend to watch more TV, suggesting that depression might be the culprit in some cases. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. There is an emerging body of research on television and addiction, but people are still trying to understand it, how many people are affected, and how it relates to other addictions that might be more disruptive to daily life. We have not found evidence tying television addiction to income level, even though people with lower incomes tend to watch more TV.

TV Man in the Autumn – photo by flickr user sualk61

Then there’s the fact that, for many, watching television is a meaningful social experience. Kawanda C. lives in New Orleans, where she doesn’t have a car. She’s 31 and didn’t finish high school. She works as a cashier, and spends a lot of time getting to and from work. She watches on average eight hours of TV a day, and loves to watch with her kids. Sonja B. also opts for companionship when taking in her favorite shows: “It’s always fun to watch TV with someone else because they might have a different perspective.” Indeed, in contrast to to Bruni and Stanca’s findings about television crowding out social activity, researcher Nele Simons’s interviews with TV watchers show that they socialize around the television they watch. She even suggests that people watching television at different times can create new opportunities for TV and socializing. In Simons’s telling, the classic mid-century meme of a traditional family unit gathered around to watch I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show continues, only today it’s football at your uncle’s place, or Game of Thrones at your corner dive bar.

Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 – from the National Archives and Records Administration.

It does seem that qualitative methodologies tend to paint a more positive picture of the effects of television. A set of interviews with Dutch adults aged 65-92 published last year explored the question of whether their television viewing habits are more often part of a selection strategy–that is, a conscious choice made to maximize wellbeing–or a compensation strategy, a choice that is made to fill time or otherwise compensate for some kind of loss or diminishment. While there were certainly examples of compensation strategies among their interviewees, the researchers more often found that people were watching TV with no regrets.

But the TV-is-good-for-you case is more than anecdotal; there’s a small but growing body of quantitative research that paints a more positive side to the medium as well. Recall that our aforementioned analysis of the General Social Survey found that among the lowest income quartile, which is also the segment that watches the most TV, more television is not associated with lower life satisfaction. One hypothesis to explain this comes from a paper by Bruno S. Frey et al. analyzing data from the European Social Survey. Frey et al. found that people with a lower opportunity cost of free time, like unemployed people or those with very fixed working hours, were less likely to report decreased life satisfaction as their TV hours increase, while the opposite was true of individuals with a high opportunity cost of their free time. If people with lower incomes tend to have a lower opportunity cost of their free time, this might explain why television at the bottom income quartile does not seem to harm life satisfaction.

While we haven’t encountered research showing positive effects of television content on adult viewers, there are some success stories for children and teens. In one study, researchers Kearney and Levine looked at the MTV franchise 16 and Pregnant–a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom sequels–and determined that the shows ultimately led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months following their introduction, which is about one third of the reduction in teen births during that period. In a follow-up, Kearney and Levine found that preschoolers who lived in areas where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school, and that this effect was much more pronounced for kids who grew up in areas with higher levels of economic disadvantage.

TV time – photo by flickr user Blake Danger Bentley

I WILL CHOOSE FREE WILL?

TV makes us fat. It dumbs us down. Too much TV makes us unhappy. Not enough TV makes us unhappy. TV makes us laugh. It keeps us informed. It keeps us from more social activities. It’s an opportunity for family time. It’s dangerous: for our feeling of self worth, for our capacity to understand right from wrong. At the end of the day, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that TV is both good and bad for us, depending on who we are, how we define good and bad, and how we go about asking and answering the question.

To be sure, not all of this evidence is created equal. If we were to pit the “TV is good” and “TV is bad” hypotheses against each other in a contest of methodologies, bad would probably win out. But how bad is bad? What exactly is the threshold of evidence of harm that would warrant taking the position that TV requires an intervention?

Here, the case of junk food provides us with a useful comparison. The impact of junk food consumption on public health has generated enough concern among reasonably-minded policy wonks to motivate multiple attempts at intervention by the state. And yet even for junk food, that movement to change behaviors has not come without controversy. The FDA, under intense pressure from Congress (and the National Restaurant Association) was forced to delay nation-wide implementation of menu labeling requirements until after the upcoming Presidential elections. (NYC implemented these same rules in 2006, and it took a full two years for them to become reality.) This past November, NYC passed a law requiring restaurants to indicate highly salted dishes; it was challenged immediately. Bloomberg’s famous soda ban was struck down, suffering from a backlash from the very people it was intended to help. Richmond, CA took a different approach, introducing a soda tax rather than a size limit, but it, too, failed.

What’s more, many of these well-meaning attempts to regulate the health of Americans don’t seem to be working: menu labeling has not been shown to change eating habits (and at least one study suggests it leads to greater caloric intake.) Kids denied in-school vending machines often end up consuming extra junk food. One year after Berkeley, CA became the first city in the US to successfully pass a soda tax, a study of its effectiveness reveals that, as the price increase has been largely assumed by distributors, the intended effect on consumers is negligible.

The no free-will bus campaign – photo by flickr user Travis Morgan

While there are certainly aspects of the effect of TV on physical, cognitive and subjective wellbeing that are concerning and deserve further exploration, given how dicey it is to seek to intervene in adults’ choices, our instinct is to exercise caution. For us to move forward in pursuing a case for change with respect to TV, we would need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing.

For us, the question of wellbeing ultimately comes down to opportunity and choice. Our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem draws inspiration from the “capability approach,” a widely adopted philosophical framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum that defines wellbeing in terms of freedoms. According to the capability approach, whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their capability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing, and having the capability to achieve various states is more important than whether or not one chooses to exercise that capability.

Frances T. talks about the impact of TV on her life

It seems like a whole lot of people are making the choice to reach for the remote. For some, this undoubtedly isn’t the best choice they could make. For others, maybe it is. And it’s really hard for us, or anyone else, to tell the difference. Tempting as it might be to judge people who spend eight hours a day in front of the TV, many of us spend that much time or more each day in front of a different sort of small screen. We can only hope that everyone who does so is as enthusiastic about it as Frances T., who confidently declared when we asked her whether TV affects her wellbeing, “it is my own wellbeing to watch TV.”

Liked this article? Two things. First, we’ll be hosting a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat to discuss the implications of this work on Wednesday, March 9 from 4-5pm Eastern time. Second, we’re conducting a reader poll to help us determine what we should investigate next. Please take 5 minutes to share your opinions! Thanks so much.

The Computing Scale Co, Burnaby Village Museum by Kenny Louie

Title: TV Viewing and BMI by Race/Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Status

Author(s): Kerem Shuval, Kelley Pettee Gabriel, Tammy Leonard

Publisher: PloS ONE

Year: 2013

URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063579

Topics: obesity, health outcomes, television viewing, socioeconomic status and race

Methods: Regression analysis of the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a nationally representative survey of people over aged 18 from across the United States about their communications and knowledge about healthcare and cancer.

What it says: This study uses data from HINTS to understand the association between obesity and television among adults when considering socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. The authors use BMI as the primary dependent variable and TV viewing, in average number of hours watched per day, as the primary independent variable. They controlled for race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status using variables for race and whether or not respondents completed a college degree and whether or not they had health insurance. They also controlled for age, gender, marital status, number of children, and variables related to respondents’ level of physical health.

They found that the odds of being overweight increased as respondents entered the third and fourth quartiles of television watching across races and socioeconomic statuses, but that the strength of the effect varied with race and socioeconomic status. For example, while they find an increased tendency toward obesity with more television viewing among non-Hispanic whites, the employed, and those with insurance, the effect is not statistically significant in the case of Hispanic and black respondents, unemployed respondents, and those without health insurance. Both college graduates and non-graduates were at increased risk for obesity in the fourth quartile of TV viewing.

What I think about it: The authors note a few important limitations to interpreting the results. The sample size for racial subpopulations is fairly small, which might disguise a real effect due to small sample size. They note that their findings are cross-sectional and do not account for how respondents’ relationship to watching television might vary over time. Additionally, they note that they do not consider factors other than television that might indicate a level of sedentary tendencies.

In terms of the significance of the findings, I think that we need more evidence to understand how television viewing and obesity relate to socioeconomic status and race. Additionally, I wonder if a more helpful statistical approach would be to examine how the increased likelihood of watching television among a particular group might make that group more prone to obesity, instead of looking at how the same amount of television viewing might lead to an increased likelihood of obesity.

What it all means: Increased television viewing leads to a higher likelihood of obesity, perhaps because of an increased tendency toward sedentary behavior. While the results of the study suggest that increased television viewing is not necessarily associated with increased obesity for all racial and socioeconomic groups, the fact that people in certain subgroups watch more television might make them more likely to become obese if we think that the relationship is causal.

• 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.