main: November 2007 Archives

Today I want to make an argument about the rise of arts culture. In the 1950s, at the dawn of TV, the medium's pioneers believed that television would be the great democratizer - exposing culture to the masses. The best of the world's culture could be brought into the living rooms of America. The early shows were full of high-art culture - symphony orchestras, plays, high-minded debates.

Of course we all know it didn't stay that way, and TV became the ultimate engine for gathering up huge audiences for something considerably different than the "high" culture originally envisioned.

But the fact that anyone thought that high culture would be the best use for this mass medium is interesting. When the National Endowment for the Arts was set up in the 1960s, its founders were thinking along the same lines. The biggest problem in American culture, they thought, was making great art available to everyone. Forty-plus years on, I think we can say that the arts-for-all crowd has succeeded spectacularly.

In 1950 there was only one full time orchestra in America. In 1965, there were only three state arts commissions. Now there are 18 full 52-week orchestras, and more than 3,000 arts commissions at the local and state levels. The 1990s were the biggest expansion of arts activity in American history; we went on a construction binge, building more than $25 billion worth of new museums, theatres, concert halls and cultural centers. Since 1990, almost one-third of all American museums have expanded their facilities. Major American museums such as the Met and the Museum of Modern Art are now so crowded the experience of visiting them has degraded.

The number of performing arts groups is up 48 percent since 1982. Last year American music schools graduated more than 14,000 students, and new fine art academies are popping up all over and overflowing with students. There are more than 250,000 choruses in America - that's choruses, not people in choruses. That means that more than four million people a week are getting together to sing. There are at least that many book clubs. Opera attendance is up 40 percent since 1990. Band instrument sales are at an all-time high, and in cities like Seattle, where I live, the youth orchestra program is so crowded, more and more orchestras have been added. Culture is a $166 billion industry, accounts for 5.7 million jobs and is America's top export.

Okay - a whoosh of statistics, and cherry-picking them as I have doesn't give a real picture. Going to the ballet or opera or museum is hardly an everyday experience for most Americans. But then, what is? Baseball might be experiencing record attendance, but wide swaths of the population are indifferent to it. TV may still dominate the average America's entertainment diet, but what they're watching has diversified.

I'm not making an argument that the arts are the new mass culture. I'm not even arguing that the audience for classical music rivals that for the pop star du jour. My point is this: Since most culture is defined in part by its relationships with the other cultures around it, if mass culture is losing its ability to gather huge audiences, and arts culture is growing, the relationship between the two needs some redefinition. In a crowd of pygmies, the arts have a different relationship to commercial culture and, I believe, the ramifications are significant.

UPDATE: Several readers have asked that I supply sources, so I'm going back through this piece and adding links to sources. The figures I've cited come from various arts studies I've accumulated over te past several years.

If the power of mass culture is based on the ability to attract a mass audience, then perhaps it's worth looking at the size of the mass.
Magazines: People magazine is solidly mass market. In 2006 it had a circulation of 3.8 million. Its rivals Us Weekly sold 1.8 million and In Style sold on average 1.7 million copies. Time magazine sold 4 million a week, Newsweek did 3.1 million, and US News came in at just over 2 million. Pretty decent numbers; all six are in the top 50 largest circulation magazines, and all are considered mass media.

But while circulations of all these magazines have eroded somewhat over the past decade (Time and US News both down 13 percent between 1988-2003), publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Economist have experienced significant jumps in circulation in the same period. The Economist has more than doubled its circulation in the US since 1992 (to 400,000) and The New Yorker is up sharply to 1.1 million from 600,000 in 1992.

Okay - I realize you can make statistics mean almost anything you want them to. But why do we consider People and Time and Us mass culture when they sell to less than 1.5 percent of an audience in a country of more than 300 million? And The New Yorker, with its 1.1 million readers (granted, a smaller number, but not that much smaller when you consider a marketplace of 300 million) is considered niche?

Another example is radio: There used to be a time when a few (usually Top 40) stations dominated a local market. Now, a station is considered reasonably viable in most markets if it gets a 2 share of the audience. In some markets a 4 share is enough to be the most popular station. In Los Angeles, five of the top 12 stations are Spanish-language, including the top-rated station. The top station doesn't even get five percent of the audience. How does any radio station lay claim to being mass culture? Nationally, the most-listened-to program is Rush Limbaugh, with 14 million listeners. But No. 2 is National Public Radio's Morning Edition (13.5 million) and No. 3 is NPR's All Things Considered (13 million). Large numbers, sure, but still less than 5 percent of the population.

Certainly among its listeners, NPR stands as a giant in radio, but out in the country as a whole, among the 85 percent who don't listen to it, is NPR considered a mass culture medium? In many markets around the country, public radio stations are among the most popular in the ratings. But perceptually, public radio isn't seen by most as the dominant radio presence. This despite the fact that NPR's audience has doubled in the past ten years.

Whether you look at TV news (nightly network newscasts used to get 50 million in audience and now reach 25 million), TV entertainment (the final episode of M*A*S*H played to 104 million, which Friends final episode got 52 million), commercial music (the No. 1-selling recordings sell significantly fewer copies than they did a decade ago and sales overall are down more than 20 percent this year) the top-selling mass culture products are losing their mass.

Like I wrote earlier, you can make stats mean different things, juxtaposing them in different ways and drawing relationships where there may not be any. But if a definition of success of mass culture is the ability to pull audience, then maybe we need to reassess where the true mass culture is when video game sales beat movie sales, public radio beats the socks off the commercial version, and attendance at arts events outstrips the audience for professional sports.

Ah, the arts. We often talk about the arts as a category that shares some basic characteristics. Are those characteristics of content or of behavior? The Museum of Modern Art is big business and in some ways has more in common with Disney in the way it operates than it does the local museum in your town. Likewise, there are commercial-model arts (like jazz, like blue grass) that survive in a model more resembling the non-profit arts than the modern commercial music business. But more on the arts audience in a future post.

We're consumed by the idea of mass culture. Since television (and before it, radio) brought the immediacy of produced culture into our living rooms, we've treated the power of a massive aggregated audience with awe. That something is popular enough to attain common currency means it has power. Mass culture pervades everything. Writers place a character or location by dropping pop culture references. Advertisers trade on the familiarity of mass culture icons to sell us things. The so-called "traditional arts" try to justify their contemporary relevance in relationship to the "mass" taste.

Our base definition of success is the mass culture definition. If something finds a mass audience then it is successful. Mass culture is expected to make money, even obscene amounts of money. Success is defined not by achievement of excellence but by the size of audience and how much money that audience makes for you.

I'm not, by the way, dumping on mass culture. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it isn't excellent, and I'm an enthusiastic consumer of mass culture myself. This isn't another high/low culture debate. Not at all.

But I do think that some of the assumptions we make about the intrinsic power of mass culture no longer hold true. Much has been written about pop culture breaking down into niches. But even as we acknowledge the fragmenting of audience, we have been reluctant to re-examine our assumptions about the power of mass culture and how it works. The very strategies that make something successful in a mass culture model may work against that success in a niche market model.

To take newspapers as an example: If the average reading level is eighth grade, in a mass-culture model you want to write to that level and hope you capture the largest demographic segment. And you hope that those below the level will give you a chance. In fact, you aggressively court this group by trying to prove your accessibility. As for the group reading above the level: your strategy for success is "where else are they going to go?" Your paper is probably the only/best/major source of news in your community.

Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content - comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports - and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content that otherwise would not have paid for itself.

I don't know a single journalist who got in the business because they wanted to make sure Garfield or Dear Abby got delivered every day, but the fact is that the content that journalists think counts most - coverage of city hall, foreign reporting, investigations - does not have a big enough audience to pay for itself on its own.

Yet somewhere along the way, this idea of niche aggregation slipped away from the local paper and was replaced by the sense that every story ought to be comprehensible by every reader. The problem: in a culture that increasingly offers more and more choice and allows people to get more precisely what they want, when they want, and how they want it, a generalized product that doesn't specifically satisfy anyone finds its audience erode away. The more general, the more broad, the more "mass culture" a newspaper tries to become, the faster its readers look elsewhere.

The very things you see newspapers doing to try to bring in new readers - Britney Spears on the cover, pandering to pop culture trends, sensationalist news stories that offer more heat than light - are the things that while they might have worked 20 years ago, don't today. That's because the celebutantes get better dish at TMZ and the Live at 5 guys do better fire and missing kids.

On websites, the celeb stuff gets more traffic, true, but these are "drive-by" clicks that don't build a readership. Not that there shouldn't be celebs in a newspaper, but they're not the solution to building a bigger audience.

Tomorrow: Just how big is that audience for celebrities?

I've decided to make this blog active and use it to write about some of the issues I care about. I've been using it as a kind of administrative tool for things which don't easily fit on other parts of ArtsJournal, but there are ideas I'd like to explore through my writing, and diacritical seems like the place to do it. So I'm going to try posting more or less once a day and see if I can get into the routine of it. Stay tuned.