Last week’s workshop on arts audiences at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center reminded me of something I heard at a Gold Coast dinner party a decade or two ago. The relative pleasures of attending the Lyric Opera and a Bears game were under discussion, and the Bears had the edge when the hostess, presiding from her seat at the far end of the table, settled the question. “Yes,” she said, in a flash of candor, “but it’s better to be seen at the opera.”
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No more, apparently. Sociologist Richard A. Peterson’s latest research on “changing arts audiences,” in progress with coauthor Gabriel Rossman, suggests that the snob value of the fine arts has taken a dive. Peterson, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University with Chicago roots (his grandfather built Peterson Avenue as a toll road), maintains there’s been a change in status indicators that’s visible, first of all, in the way people present themselves. “Informality is all around us,” he noted in his talk last week, illustrating the point with pictures of a tieless George W. Bush and looking like a page from L.L. Bean himself. Highbrows are now a lot more casual in their dress, and a lot less exclusive in their cultural activities.
Music industry marketing gurus who are packaging Yo-Yo Ma with Appalachian fiddler Mark O’Connor have picked up on this omnivorousness, Peterson says. But arts organizations that continue to appeal for support by stressing the “precious and exclusive nature of the fine arts and the danger they face from the encroachments of popular culture” may alienate both highbrow omnivores and a substantial group of lowbrows who share some highbrow tastes. Peterson’s most recent work indicates that about 40 percent of lowbrows are open to a range of cultural experiences and 44 percent of those say they like classical music or opera. These are impressive numbers in light of the huge disparity in size between the lowbrow and highbrow cohorts: lowbrows make up 93 percent of the population.
