I hope you don’t have abandonment issues! I just got back on the red eye from Las Vegas, where I spent three booze-filled days doing pretty much the opposite of high culture in every respect. Who says a love for craps and F. Holland Day is irreconcilable?
Well, I’m running on twenty-five minutes of sleep that I snuck in between arriving at EWR and showing up for work this morning, but didn’t want to go another day without posting– so bear with me if I’m incoherent.
The Washington Post ran a buzz-killing story today:
Two separate national surveys gauging youth and adult participation in the arts reported yesterday that visits to art museums are declining.
A study of nearly 4,000 eighth-grade students, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found dwindling field trips over the past decade. “The percentage of eighth-graders who reported that they visited an art museum or gallery with their classes dropped from 22 percent in 1997 to 16 percent in 2008,” said Stuart Kerachsky, the acting commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the assessment.
The National Endowment for the Arts also released new data yesterday showing that fewer adults were choosing an art museum or a visual arts festival as a leisure-time destination. From 1992 to 2001, 26 percent of adults reported that they visited such attractions, but the number for 2008 dropped to 23 percent. The decrease is small, but it may portend coming declines as the most loyal part of the museum audience ages. The exception, the NEA said, was in the D.C. metropolitan area, where 40 percent of adults said they had visited a museum in 2008 — reflecting tourism and free admission at most major museums.
In addition, the agency noted sizable declines between 1982 (when it first started documenting arts participation) and 2008 in almost every performing arts field. It reported double-digit rates of decline for classical music, jazz, opera, musical theater, ballet and dramatic plays.
Clearly, cocktail parties of the future are in danger. In all seriousness, though, this is sick! In New York, I know a few museums like the Guggenheim and the American Museum of Natural History are hosting socially-oriented parties once a month to bring in a younger crowd. Also, the Met has been doing good work to make opera more widely seen by new audiences, from screening live stage performances to movie theaters across the country and bringing in movie and Broadway directors to enhance the experience for a younger generation (perhaps with shorter attention spans). Especially in the down economy, museums in particular need to take advantage of people’s desire for cheap entertainment– find revenue models that do away with admission fees and develop programming that’s engaging and accessible.
And more super art blogs couldn’t hurt either. Nighty night.
