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.
General
The Cultural Lives of Californians
For many years, arts nonprofits have been tracking a downward trend in arts attendance. By looking beyond the typical events used as benchmarks to reflect traditional measures of participation, the NORC study reveals a seemingly contradictory takeaway: The new narrative is not entirely about decline! Californians actually have a deep interest in the arts and lead active cultural lives. People want to engage, in art-making and arts-learning in particular. Emerging technologies, expectations and cultural norms mean art is happening in new places and ways. At the same time, this updated narrative comes with elements of urgency for the nonprofit arts sector — for example, California’s largest and growing demographic groups do report lower overall arts participation and they are less likely to attend benchmark arts events.
Bridging the Capacity Gap: Cultural Practitioners’ Perspectives on Data
In the summer of 2013, the Cultural Data Project (CDP) partnered with Slover Linett Audience Research to engage leading researchers in a virtual dialogue about cultural data and its role in supporting the long-term health, sustainability, and effectiveness of the cultural sector. The resulting white paper, New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape: Toward a Better-Informed, Stronger Sector, identified six key challenges that appear to be inhibiting the field from more strategically and effectively engaging in data-informed decision-making practices (see p. 3).
With that report as a starting point, the CDP sought to expand the conversation to include the perspectives of arts practitioners, artists, service organizations, and funding agencies working on the “front lines,” by hosting a series of town hall-style meetings in five cities across the country. At these meetings, participants discussed the challenges identified in the New Data Directions report, articulated other challenges they’re facing, and began to suggest solutions.
Minding the gap: Elucidating the disconnect between arts participation metrics and arts engagement within immigrant communities
A growing gap between national metrics of arts participation and the many, evolving ways in which people participate in artistic and aesthetic activities limits the degree to which such data can usefully inform policy decisions. The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) is the primary source of arts participation data in the USA, but this instrument inadequately evaluates how members of minority and immigrant communities participate in the arts.
A Proposed National Standard Taxonomy for Reporting Data on Support for Individual Artists
For several years, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) members who support individual artists have noted the lack of sector-wide data on artist support, the lack of a common taxonomy to explain the different forms of artist support, and the lack of benchmark data to track artist support over time. Recognizing that this is a complex
picture and that support comes in many forms and from diverse sources, GIA has developed a taxonomy that permits comprehensive, systematic tracking of support to individual artists.
A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings From the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012
This report synthesizes findings across several modes of arts participation (attending the visual and performing arts, reading literature, creating/performing art, using digital media to consume art, and learning within the arts) to show how many American adults–and from which backgrounds–have engaged in art throughout the decade of 2002 to 2012.
