Wallace Foundation Launches 'Building New Audiences for Sustainability' Initiative

 

One of the biggest questions today in the sector commonly and somewhat misleadingly known as “the arts” is how to build audiences for the future. Audiences for orchestras, opera, dance and theater are in a gradual declining trend, gently or rapidly, and there’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there about the reasons why. A frequent scapegoat is the lack of arts education in the schools, which implies that if people were only better educated, they would love these art forms — despite the fact that a lot of the audience members who are not going to performances these days are in their 40s and 50s, and therefore DID have the benefit of arts education. More immediate culprits, to my mind, are social change, the evolution of artistic tastes, and a far greater number of ways to occupy one’s so-called leisure time, or what’s left of it.

 

Looking at ways to solve the problem is a more productive approach; and the Wallace Foundation is putting $52 million where its mouth is, to attempt it. Today, the foundation announced a new initiative called “Building New Audiences for Sustainability,” which has selected 26 organizations across the country, from a pool of some 300 applicants, for awards earmarked for specific audience-building projects....