Americans for the Arts

Trends in the Canadian Performing Arts is an extensive statistical overview of the Canadian performing arts for the period 1972-1983. It reports on the performing arts at the aggregate level as well as according to discipline, size and geographic categories. Data are shown for individual disciplines (dance, music, opera and theatre), for expenditure categories (small, medium and large companies) and for individual provinces and Census Metropolitan Areas.

Because the arts can generate significant economic benefits, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that performing arts centers, ballet companies, theatres, music festivals and other concrete manifestations of the arts can play central roles in state and local economic development strategies. That may or may not be the case, depending on local circumstances, including the characteristics of the state or local economy and the project or activity in question.

The author examines painting and painters from a neoclassical economic perspective. He analyzes arts production in terms of supply, exchange, and demand. And so, the text discusses arts as a career, the art markets, museums, and government assistance. Written in accessible language, the text addresses a wide range of issues and contextualizes the question of government subsidies.

You will have guessed from my title that what I have to say will be neither reassuring nor very constructive. I do believe the arts are in a bad way in this country. Measured by admissions to live performances of legitimate theatre and music, our art consumption per head is less than a half of West Germany's and Austria's, little better than half of Norway's and Switzerland's and less than a third of such East European countries like Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In a cultural center like San Francisco, the past season's more than 1.8 million admissions are very impressive when

The economics of the arts is a relatively new subject, with a small but steadily growing literature. It has emerged in recent years out of the eagerness of economists to apply their tools to hitherto untried areas and the recognition by arts administrators of the increasing economic pressures on the arts. The the time is hardly ripe for a textbook in the economics of the arts but this collection of articles will, it is hoped, demonstrate that there really is such a subject and that its achievements to date have already done much to illuminate the economic problems of the arts. (p. 13)

The craving for artistic fulfillment by those in the performing arts may be likened to the spiritual pursuits of the holy man in search of divine realization, for not only is the nurture and discipline of talent characteristically a highly ascetic process, the expected rewards traditionally provide meagre financial compensation. The probabilities determining these expected rewards are subject not only to the scarcity of genius but also to the size of the net inflow into the performing arts and the perspicacity with which entrants judge their own training and abilities. For example, other

The application of economics to the arts teaches us almost as much about economics as about the arts. The tools and concepts which prove to be most fruitful are those which are acquired in any first year course in economic principles: the response of demand to variations in prices and incomes; the role of prices in rationing scarce supplies; the notion of substitution at the margin in both production and consumption; the distinction between fixed and variable costs, and between average and marginal costs; the idea of a preference function underlying all private and public decisions; the

Subsidizing the Arts involves the same kind of issues as subsidizing particular industries or services in the economy, however distasteful this may seem to those who are conditioned to think in terms of a moral hierarchy in the ordering of consumption expenditure. In this analysis, attention is confined to two arguments for subsidization which are derived from the existence of market failure i.e. the recognition that the strict Paretian assumptions of divisibility of goods and absence of externalities of production and consumption are not met with in practical life. A particular aspect of

Romanticism long ago fixed in our minds the idea that there is something inevitable about the association between artistic achievement and poverty. The starving artist has become a stereotype among whose overtones is the notion that squalor and misery are noble and inspiring. It is one of the happier attributes of our time that we have generally been disabused of this type of absurdity. We readily recognize that poverty is demeaning rather than inspiring - that instead of stimulating the artist it deprives him of the energy, time or even the equipment with which to create or perform. The

In the past few years the economic pressures besetting live performance have grown dramatically in large part for reasons discussed in various papers in this collection, in part for reasons that were not anticipated. In this preface I will attempt to review some pertinent developments in recent years, and to discuss some of the reasons that led matters to develop as they did. (p. 1-12)

In our economy, under a free market system, we normally assume that the best allocation of resources is determined by the free market. The price of goods and services reflects the cost to society of these services, and the consumer purchases them on the basis of what they are worth to him.

Broadway attendance during an average week in February of 1963 was only 20 percent better than it had been in 1933. Yet over the same period, spending on the performing arts more than tripled, ticket sales for spectator sports more than doubled, and real per capita GNP advanced 160 percent. The purpose of this paper is to determine why the demand for seats to the most professional, most polished, and most popular legitimate theatre in the should have grown so slowly. In the process, elasticity estimates of the relationship between income-quantity, income-quality, price quantity and

A careful perusal of the annual reports of the Arts Council since 1946 leaves no doubt that the Council disburses its funds to satisfy a number of more or less clearly defined objectives. These may be summarised as:

The author discusses the economics of the London orchestra market, where most of the funding for the major orchestras comes from concerts and recordings. The special features of London's orchestra market--several orchestras playing many concerts, the need to sell individual concerts rather than relying on subscriptions, paying the players on a piecework basis and the orchestras' need to earn 75-80% of their budgets--have profound implications for the economic behaviour [behavior] and programming of these orchestras, and well as for their marketing practices.
(p. 12)

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