Moby Media: has entertainment swallowed up the arts audience in Los Angeles?

            Despite recent loss of production to less expensive locations, residents of Los Angeles still live at the epicenter of the entertainment industry.  Audiences in other parts of the country and world receive their entertainment at various degrees of remove from the site of production, whereas we who live here are touched more directly by the players in the game of mass-media fabrication.  We are part of the same economy.  Large numbers of the people who create the world’s mass culture shop at our markets, drive our freeways, and contribute to our local cultural environment of both large and small scale arts organizations.  In this paper, I will investigate the arts and entertainment audiences in Los Angeles and what kind of a relationship they share.

The starting place for my consideration is scale; the number of viewers for mass media entertainment, specifically film and television, compared to audiences for other arts programming represents a spectrum so wide that we almost can’t see across the divide. 

The Music Center is one of the three largest performing arts centers in the nation, and, according to its own measure, “one of the world's premier cultural organizations”.[1] The Grand Avenue complex is home to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Ahmanson Theater, Mark Taper Forum and Walt Disney Concert Hall (representing a mix of nonprofit and for profit entities). Each year, the Music Center welcomes more than 1.3 million people to performances by its performing arts companies: Los Angeles Philharmonic; Center Theatre Group (CTG); Los Angeles Opera; and Los Angeles Master Chorale. The 2006 annual budget for The Music Center and its performing companies was $207,800,000.[2] 

The income side of the profit and loss statement for this conglomerate includes donations and other revenue as well as ticket purchases by the Music Center’s guests.  The budget and scale of The Music Center set it in a class apart from any other performing arts cultural institution in Los Angeles, where it appears to be a heavyweight in the field of audience development, until it is compared with audiences and budgets for film and television. 

In addition to the two distinct cultural sectors of major cultural institutions and mass media entertainment, in 2004, the Los Angeles and Orange County area was also home to 1,006 smaller nonprofit and community arts and cultural organizations.  In order to think about the spectrum of arts audiences in Los Angeles, we should consider that the 1,006 nonprofit arts and culture organizations made up 10% of the local nonprofit organizations with annual gross receipts of $25,000 or more.  When arts nonprofits’ budgets are compared to the budgets of nonprofits in other fields, they accounted for only 3% of both revenue and expenditure, suggesting that arts and culture nonprofits are generally smaller than nonprofit organizations in fields like health, education or social services.[7]  The research shows that the total (2004) revenue for nonprofit arts organizations in the Los Angeles area was $1,133,000.  1.13 million dollars divided by 1,006 organizations pencils out to a very modest revenue amount for all of them, indicating that the audience numbers for this cultural sector are extremely small.

Although these figures provide only fragmentary glimpses into the finances and attendance of the three cultural sectors in Los Angeles, even rudimentary analysis of The Titanic’s revenue and television-watching statistics when compared to audiences for performances at The Music Center and other arts and cultural events, would suggest that we, as members of the arts public, spend significantly more time and money watching films and television than attending other arts and cultural programs.  

Cultural organizations have learned to stretch a small budget to remarkable lengths in their efforts to produce work but continuing reductions in funding mean that earned income, most often ticket sales, will need to support an increasing percentage of the cost of keeping organizations afloat.  Arts groups have learned how to weather the cuts following the reduction of California Arts Council funding, which fell from a high of $32,000,000 in 2001 to $3,200,000 in 2006.  The trend continues with the Altria Group announcement in fall, 2006, that it was planning to spin off its Kraft Foods division.  As part of the restructuring, Altria, formerly Philip Morris, is phasing out its significant support for the arts, which has funneled $210 million to cultural groups over the last four decades.[8] 

These cuts form the backdrop against which the nonprofit arts and cultural groups have played out a drama of transformation.  Their traditional model no longer works, in which philanthropic and governmental support provides the majority of operating funds needed, and a loyal subscription audience provides the balance of funds, mostly through season-ticket sales.  That stability was destroyed in the mid-1990’s by the “culture wars,” in which the NEA went head-to-head with artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.[9]  When the dust settled, federal funding for the arts had dropped from its high of $175,000 in FY 1992 to $99 million in FY 1996, a fact of life that was echoed across all sources of donations as funders attempted to deal with the escalating demands driven by government funding cuts and increased numbers of arts providers.

These difficulties were compounded by the economic downturn in California, particularly in Los Angeles, during which the city experienced a net loss of 149,000 jobs from 1994 to 1999, with many affluent white-collar workers displaced through the downsizing of the aerospace industry.[10]

In 2000, three major arts funders, The Haas Fund, The Hewlett Foundation, and the Irvine Foundation commissioned a study, “The California Arts Audience Research Project. The Performing Arts in California: Rebuilding, Repositioning, Re-emerging.”  Their goal was to investigate the factors that affected audience-development efforts, 1992-1998, for performing arts in all types of types of institutions.  They chose four California cities as research sites: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose.[11]  The study found that audiences in all four cities changed, evolved and declined during those years.  The following factors were identified as having a significant bearing on the transformations:  The market was flooded with new product, including increased commercial, for-profit offerings.  Managers reported both an oversaturated market and diminished demand for arts programming.  In Los Angeles alone, twenty six additional performing arts venues were added between 1992 and 1998.  The lines were blurred between entertainment and performing arts, which has a potential long-term impact on fundraising, as well as on the ways the performing arts have traditionally been packaged.  The report noted that in the effort to fill more seats, there is more “entertainment” versus “arts” evident in each city, a clear indication that the divide that has traditionally separated the missions of nonprofit arts organizations from the profit-driven bottom line of the entertainment industries, is being breached.

More diverse entertainment programming within presenting series is leading presenters away from reliance on subscriptions.  Some presenters, particularly in the Los Angeles market, no longer sell series tickets at all, relying on single event ticket buyers.  The research team identified organizations that had not kept pace with changing market interests also found it harder to compete with commercial venues.  Once-edgy performance art organizations whose original audiences had grown to middle age reported that acts such as Cirque du Soleil, MTV, and cutting-edge club venues had drawn the new young audience away form the very types of nonprofit organizations that were founded in the nineteen seventies to satisfy the young-adult market’s demands for cutting–edge product.

            Three quarters of the performing arts institutions studied reported significant audience decline coupled with an overall decrease in subscribers, beginning in the 1994-5 season.  One Los Angeles theatre reported losing 15,000 subscribers mid-decade.  Many report that by the end of the decade, single ticket sales were starting to offset the subscription declines, but half the organizations were unable to make up the deficit with single ticket sales.  Consumers polled in focus groups reported a consensus behavioral shift towards a “pick and choose” approach to attendance at cultural events which caused them to drop previously held subscriptions.

            Organizations that were able to counteract the diminishing mid-decade audience numbers went through a major restructuring of their planning and business practices, resulting in changed audiences, programming or both.   The list of strategies that they employed seems to have been borrowed from the for-profit playbook: they embraced the full concept of marketing and focused on what consumers wanted from the event experience; customer service became a key strategy for ticket sales, with money-back guarantees if people didn’t like the program; they changed their image away from an intimidating “insiders’ club” to become more inviting; and web-based communications built and maintained relations with a new generation of audiences.  Perhaps most importantly, they listened to their markets and acted upon what they heard, delivering the diverse programs of excellent quality that audiences told them that they wanted to see.

            Many of the issues involved in the reduction of audiences were amplified and expanded in the 2006 report, “Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California,” commissioned and published by The Irvine Foundation.[12]  This study took a broader, and more positive view of the public’s engagement with the arts, saying that “if we use a broad definition of cultural participation, including attending ‘low brow’ cultural events such as movies and street fairs, playing in a garage band or painting on Sundays as well as attending museums, regional theaters and other ‘high brow’ institutions,” over 95% of the American public engage with some form of cultural activity.[13]  The report goes on to clarify that despite that level of participation, audiences for nonprofit arts organizations are generally flat or shrinking and it is accepted that “the field of cultural institutions is overcrowded.  The nonprofit arts are competing for consumer attention not only with other nonprofit arts groups, but with the full range of commercial and nonprofit leisure options available.  The commercial arts sector, once thought to be inferior in quality to the nonprofit arts sector, now serves large parts of the nonprofit sector’s former

market . . . It appears that the era of the nonprofit arts organization’s preeminence in the American cultural landscape is coming to a close.”[14]   Five factors are identified as being key in the on-going defection of the nonprofit arts audience to other forms of entertainment: access to technology that has fundamentally changed the production, distribution and consumption of culture; a lack of cultural policy that provides shared understanding and compelling arguments about the public value of culture; reduction or excision of arts education in the public school during the last few decades which has allowed generations of potential arts consumers to grow up without experience of the arts; a failure of the traditional nonprofit business model to understand or accommodate changing consumption patterns; and finally, the lack of effective preparation of current or future arts managers to respond to these changing conditions.[15]

Artists have never been limited to working exclusively in either for-profit or the nonprofit organizations and increasingly, the two sectors are interdependent in developing creative talent.  This is particularly true in Los Angeles, “where the nonprofit sector is able to thrive as it does because of the other opportunities for artists to support themselves through work for the entertainment industry . . . Both the for-profit and nonprofit culture industries have a stake in each other’s continued vitality.”[16] 

Although the economic picture shows a segmented and financially lopsided division between the three major arts domains in Los Angeles, further investigation shows that artists traverse those boundaries both peripatetically and creatively.  In the complex endeavor of putting a life together as a working artist, musicians, actors, visual artists, and dancers work around and within the array of for-profit and non-profit arts arenas that the city has to offer.  Artists teach us to look beyond the high-low art dichotomy left over from the old school, modernist art world.  Los Angeles offers a new model that goes beyond a shame-faced acknowledgement of working a day-job to keep body and soul together, while an artist to works after-hours on her real, though undervalued, “art.”  Visual artists make money by working on film sets as well as in their own studios; actors derive their income from both 99-seat equity waiver houses and by doing commercial voice-overs and corporate training videos, writers and musicians move between for-profit and nonprofit sectors to enjoy the advantages of each.

A 2006 survey and report, “Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Nonprofit and Community Work,” confirms that since 1960, when the formation of the National Endowment for the Arts encouraged an explosion of nonprofit arts organizations, stereotypes about artists had come to “encumber the way that we look at art-making practice in American society . . . The borders between sectors appeared heavily guarded by mindsets as well as gatekeepers and difficult for artists to cross.”[17]  The report studied artists and their practices in both San Francisco and Los Angeles and shows that “The Los Angeles area offers greater opportunities for crossover, while San Francisco Bay Area artists are more apt to specialize in one sector or another.  Because Los Angeles is a world hub for the entertainment industries, LA-based actors, musicians, visual artists and writers find it easier to work across sectors.”

We see the signs of this symbiosis in organizations such as The Actors’ Gang, whose founders include Oscar winner, Tim Robbins, or the current Ahmanson Theatre production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” starring film icon, Kathleen Turner.  Some of the problematic underside of Los Angeles’s still hierarchical arts and culture community is reflected in Les Spindle’s 2006 article, “L.A.'s 'Actors' Gang' Turns 25.”   “The Los Angeles theatre community has something in common with the late, great comedian Rodney Dangerfield: It keeps fighting hard to get some respect. Despite the number of superb companies and the abundance of quality productions on the boards here, our film-capital metropolis is still frequently dismissed as a poor man's theatre town.”[18]  The “Crossover” study identifies continuing barriers to artists’ abilities to work in all areas of Los Angeles’s arts and cultural sectors as well as the many ways that those borders are transgressed.  Artists’ growing ability to work broadly throughout our communities, the study concludes, is a major stimulant to regional economic activity and the quality of life and continued crossover work between sectors will enrich not only the artists but also their communities.
Sources Consulted:

A.C. Nielsen Company statistics on their website, accessed February 18, 2007; available at: http://us.acnielsen.com/news/20050225.shtml

Actors Gang Website, accessed at February 22, 2007; available at http://www.theactorsgang.com/news/news63.htm

California State University at Northridge, Science Education website site; accessed February 18, 2007; available at http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html#tv_stats

“Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California,” a James Irvine Foundation publication; September 2006, accessed on February 22, 2007; available at http://www.irvine.org/assets/pdf/pubs/arts/Critical_Issues_Arts.pdf

Markusen, Ann, Sam Gilmore, Amanda Johnson, Titus Levi, Andrea Martinez.  “Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Nonprofit and Community work,” The Arts Economy Initiative Project of Regional and Industrial Economics, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, October 2006, p5,  accessed March 4, 2007, available at: http://www.irvine.org/assets/pdf/pubs/arts/Crossover_72dpi.pdf

Pogrebin, Robin. “Arts Organizations Adjust to Decline in Funding.” New York Times, February 21, 2007.