Arts trends don’t look good for new venue

Recently, Beaufort County Council member Stu Rodman asserted that tourist-oriented performances are the key to making a Hilton Head Island arts venue work. Logic would thereby dictate a simple question: If that is true, why hasn’t the existing performing arts center succeeded, given Hilton Head’s heady tourism popularity?

Obviously, forecasting performing arts attendance (or lack thereof) is much more complex than predicting thin assumptions to arrive at a funding number for the “first $24 million of a multi-purpose hall.”

Perhaps Mr. Rodman might read the National Endowment for the Arts Research Report #58 of January 2015, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012.”

There is much information to be gleaned in this comprehensive report. Broadly, the trends for attendance are down from a decade ago, with older adults being the only demographic subgroup to show an increase in performing-arts attendance. From 1982 to 2012, percentages of all adults (18 and older) attending benchmark arts activities has declined from 39 percent to 33.4 percent, with metropolitan areas showing much higher attendance than smaller demographic areas.

In his book “Curtains? The Future of the Arts in America,” Michael Kaiser, former Kennedy Center impresario and arts consultant, predicts that by 2035 today’s array of nonprofit theaters will shrink substantially. The low cost and high quality of online events will reduce the number of live performances, and only companies with resources that can develop exciting, ambitious and remarkable work will likely survive the wide varieties of technologies affecting the arts.

This story was originally published May 28, 2017 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Arts trends don’t look good for new venue."