Createquity’s May 6 post Why Don’t They Come? was a thoroughly researched piece on barriers to arts participation. It addressed the question of why:
People with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) participate at lower rates [than others] 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.
I have great respect for researchers. I sometimes say that “some of my best friends are researchers.” But I’ll confess I did not get a “passion for research” gene myself. So I’m deeply grateful when people who are good at it investigate issues that are important to me and to my work.
Before I begin to comment on what’s included in the piece, let me acknowledge a profound sense of unease in discussing the mind and motivation of people who are described in the report as low-SES (socio-economic status). This tends to make me feel a bit like an anthropologist observing an exotic tribe. These are simply fellow citizens with less education, money, and, therefore, far fewer advantages than I.
With that concession to my discomfort, let me grossly oversimplify a few of the report’s observations. It finds that lack of time and money are not as significant as some might think. That is both surprising and heartening. Expense was, however, still cited by a significant percentage (45%) of those surveyed as a deterrent to participation.
The report has a speculation that “(Maybe) They’re Just Not Into You.” Higher percentages of this group watch television than groups with more education or income.
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?
There is another possibility, although it’s potentially related to the last cited in the report–a “learned” or socially reinforced preference. My friend Nina Simon (yes, this is two posts in a row where I’m leaning on her) recently revisited Threshold Fear: “the sense of discomfort upon walking into an unfamiliar and potentially threatening space.” Unfamiliarity with an exotic venue creates a profound sense of inertia when considering the possibility of doing something new. The belief that they would be unwelcome or feel out of place may have a good deal to do with the results found in this research.
The report concludes that time and financial constraints are less significant than we might believe intuitively. If, instead, threshold fear is a factor–and my entirely unresearched gut tells me it may be–devising ways to effectively invite and truly welcome newcomers may be of more importance than “simply” finding means to lower barriers of cost or time commitment.
Engage!
Doug
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Thanks for the writeup and commentary! Re: “low-SES,” this and the “they” in the title were things we struggled with for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Ultimately, we couldn’t figure out an alternate terminology to use that didn’t make the language completely unwieldy. Between the third-person nature of the type of analysis we do and the fact that virtually all of our readership likely has (or will soon have) a college degree, talking about people who have never attended college is inevitably going to come off as somewhat othering. We’re hoping to include quotes from people in the target demographic if/when we write about this in the future, which hopefully will restore a bit of the humanity to the term. If you have other suggestions for how we could handle this better, we’d love to hear them!
Interesting connection to the Nina’s idea of “threshold fear.” For me, this makes sense for fancy museums and concert halls but is puzzling in light of the fact that low-SES adults are just as underrepresented at movie theaters and sporting events, which I wouldn’t have thought of as unwelcoming spaces.
Sure, “threshold fear” is most acute for low-income people wherever there are dress codes, behavior codes and a cadre of expectations that SEEM to draw dirty looks, whispers or the dreaded SHUSH. I would like to ease classical music past these stone barriers by creating a new tradition in bars and restaurants using club rules. But ultimately, we can’t share the best of classical until we encourage a new tradition in concert halls, with something like introductory concerts explicitly allowing new listeners to talk, move, drink, sing, dance during the concert. In time, this format might become more popular, while a subset will become more curious/hungry for the established tradition in meditative silence.
As for bringing new audience who avoid classical over the threshold into Orchestra Hall, Detroit Symphony hosts the annual Concert of Colors festival bringing THOUSANDS of fans of rock and blues and world music into the facilities FREE OF CHARGE. People of almost all SES witness and participate together during this 4-day collage of over 50 ensembles, singers and dancers across 4 performance spaces! Everything is amplified, so no one is shushed out. The community is indeed engaged by what it wants to see, and experiences Orchestra Hall as a defacto community space for the last 10 years. http://www.concertofcolors.com/about/
Art and Entertainment must join hands to engage the whole community.