Abstract
The socioeconomic composition of attendance at the arts has interested researchers and policy-makers for decades, with marked differences in attendance by social class, particularly educational level, persisting over time. Drawing on the 2012 US Public Participation in the Arts survey, and to a lesser extent a 2013 Eurobarometer survey, this chapter outlines attendance by educational level at arts events; and then considers differences by educational level in active participation in the arts. Such active participation includes attendance at classes in for example music or painting or dance, or creating art experiences at home or elsewhere. The reasons for the uneven pattern of attendance are then discussed and the article concludes with a short discussion of why these patterns have persisted for so long and the possible general policy implications.
This chapter is a reprint of O’Hagan, J. (2014). Attendance at/Participation in the Arts by Educational Level: Evidence and Issues, Homo Oeconomicus, 31(3), 411–429.
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Notes
- 1.
Researchers also have devoted much work to analysing the determinants of attendance at cultural events in different countries which is related of course to the topic of this paper. For recent examples, see: Vander Stichele and Laermans (2006), Chan and Goldthorpe (2007), Lunn and Kelly (2008), Bunting et al. (2008), and Palma et al. (2013).
- 2.
Within this category, one might identify passive consumption as opposed to active consumption. The latter consumption requires active mental engagement between the consumer of the art and the work of art. The dividing line between passive and active consumption is a grey area, although we all can think of areas of the arts where appreciation of the art form requires some preparation and/or prior knowledge and active mental engagement and others where the opposite applies. Some suggest that the so-called ‘classical arts’ involve a high level of skill to execute on the production side and a high level of accumulated experience and knowledge to appreciate on the consumption side, and it is this that distinguishes them from the ‘popular’ arts (see later). While this might be the case in general, within an arts form, for example film or classical music, there are also marked gradations in terms of these requirements on the production and consumption sides of the activity. Nonetheless, the above distinctions and considerations are useful to bear in mind in the discussion that follows. DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004) also touch on this issue, and they define high culture art forms as artistic genres that are treated by critics as ‘serious’, characterised by a tendency for evaluation to place greater priority on responses of critics and artists than on responses of the general public, are represented in college and university curricula, are likely to receive subvention from government agencies or through tax breaks to private patrons based on the perceived aesthetic value of their product and are usually produced and distributed by nonprofit organizations.
- 3.
- 4.
As Keaney (2008) points out though attendance/participation surveys do not differentiate between those sections of the arts with state funding and otherwise. Nor do they differentiate between attendance/participation in home country and abroad. Nonetheless it is clear which art forms do receive the bulk of their funding from the state in relation to attendance but probably not in relation to participation.
- 5.
Education was found to be the driving determinant of differences in participation in the arts in England for example (see Bunting et al. 2008 and also O’Hagan 1996). This though does not address the issue of access by ethnic group, an issue of significant importance in the United States and Europe. This aspect of cultural equity could be the subject of an interesting further paper (see Yoshitomi 1991).
- 6.
There have been some problems with aspects of the 2012 data, as evidenced by the following. “On the week of June 22, 2014, the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed that it had used a different technique for identifying completed interviews for the 2012 SPPA than had been used in prior years of the survey. As this methodological choice has serious effects on how the survey data are weighted, the National Endowment for the Arts has requested a fully revised data file for the 2012 SPPA.” See more at: http://arts.gov/publications/additional-materials-related-to-2012-sppa#sthash.yFRaSQdv.dpuf. As such, some of the data in the tables must be treated with caution. Also where there were particular problems identified in the source, 2008 data were used in the tables in this paper.
- 7.
Other factors apart from educational level may explain this variation. The main other factor here would be income. As such, the variations in the data in the tables that follow reflect joint differences in educational and income levels to a certain extent. As educational and income levels are so correlated though it is impossible to separate their individual effects in regression without leaving out the combined influence of each, because of the multicollinearity problem. As such, the data in the table tell a more complete story of the variation by broad educational/income group than any regression analysis. Besides, as pointed out in Footnote 4, other studies have shown that education is by far the best indicator of attendance rates in the arts.
- 8.
- 9.
As Yoshitomi (1991, p. 209) states: “We appear to be operating under the assumption that the most important music is that which is played by ensembles in 3000-seat concert halls, because that is where most of our public funds to support music are allocated. The gospel music sung by millions of people every Sunday morning cannot be supported…. unless it is taken out of its natural support mechanisms, the church. Because it cannot be supported directly, by connotation we are saying to each other that one type of music is more important than another. Or to put it another way, we may be saying that one of the only live cultural experiences an African American child encounters on a weekly basis is not art.” When at school, “I learned that Japanese prints that my grandmother hung on the walls in our home were not the ‘real’ art that was described in the books. I learned that ikebana and bonsai where hobbies, not art”.
- 10.
As mentioned earlier, it is almost impossible to ascertain the level of public funding of active participation in the arts, given the diverse funding sources; partly because of this there is much less concern with the equity aspects of this state expenditure.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank three anonymous referees for the journal from which this chapter is reproduced for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as Sara Mitchell for assistance in compiling some of the data relating to the US.
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O’Hagan, J. (2017). Attendance at/Participation in the Arts by Educational Level: Evidence and Issues. In: Ateca-Amestoy, V., Ginsburgh, V., Mazza, I., O'Hagan, J., Prieto-Rodriguez, J. (eds) Enhancing Participation in the Arts in the EU. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09096-2_4
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