Createquity Studies Arts Participation in Report

Submitted by Steve on May 7, 2015

Percentage of U.S. adults who attended a performing arts event, by art form and family income level, 2012

A new report from Createquity takes a deep look at the data on Arts Participation, and also trends in television usage, across segments of the US population at different income and education levels. “Why Don't They Come?” does in fact conclude that television is taking an increasingly dominant role in shaping our cultural lives, especially with the low-income and low-education population.

There is a rich irony lurking just beneath the surface here: television, a largely for-profit commercial industry, routinely does a much better job engaging the most economically vulnerable members of our population than our supposedly charitable nonprofit arts institutions that receive tens of billions of dollars annually in government-sanctioned subsidy.

As TV becomes increasingly untethered from broadcast networks and big cable channels and increasingly experienced on laptops and handheld devices, the nonprofit arts sector would do well to let go of its historical marginalization of the small screen. For better or worse, television is a powerful cultural force, and ignoring it is no longer tenable in an era of increased attention to cultural equity and community relevance.

Read the full report online.