McCarthy: If you think back to what the arts world in general looked like at the end of World War II, most of the major venues were situated in major metropolitan areas and were sponsored by wealthy individuals. And these venues catered primarily to an affluent Anglo population. Now, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Ford Foundation sponsored an initiative to build up the performing arts infrastructure across the country that was much more diverse.

Goodman: That led to increased participation n the arts, which continues today. The latest National Endowment for the Arts survey shows more than 80 million Americans attended arts events last year; five million more than in 1992. But increased participation hasn’t led to increased diversity of audiences. NEA surveys consistently show that arts attendance rates increase significantly with education and income. College graduates have classical music and ballet attendance rates five times higher than high school graduates. And those earning more than $75,000 per year constitute 40% of the total audience for both opera and ballet. Tom Schorgl says it doesn’t have to always be that way.

Schorgl: It’s up to the arts and cultural organization to determine how broad and diverse it would like its audience to be. Its audience is very willing to be broad and diverse.

Goodman: Schorgl heads CPAC, the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, that has been working to make Cleveland the last of the major cities to have public funding for the arts. CPAQ’s latest survey shows 66% support an arts tax and 96% value arts and culture. The survey had an even ratio of high income, middle income and low-income respondents.

Goodman: Matthew Jordan is one of the area’s low-income culture vultures. When he isn’t studying or practicing his trombone, he delivers ice and pizza to put himself through school. On an income of less than $11,000 per year, he can’t afford to buy tickets, but he gets in free to Severance Hall through the Kent State School of Music. Matt enjoys the music, but even in his best khakis, dress shirt and tie, he can feel underdressed...

Jordan:: There’s a lot of people there in tuxedos or fur-lined coats, that sort of thing. If you’re self-conscious about that, it would probably be pretty intimidating.

Goodman: Cleveland’s classical audiences may be more upscale than other parts of the country. Nationwide, according to the NEA survey, 62% of attendees at classical concerts earn more than $50,00 a year. But at Severance Hall, more than half of the people sitting in those plush velvet seats earn more than $100,000 per year. The demographics are similar for subscribers to the Cleveland Opera, the Akron Symphony and the Cleveland Playhouse. The Community Partnership for Arts and Culture’s latest audience survey shows that Northeast Ohio’s most frequent attendees of arts and cultural events are more likely to have high education levels—72% with bachelor’s degrees. And very high-income levels—over 25% have an annual household income over $100,000. If the lower and middle classes say they value the arts, but the audiences remain disproportionally upper class, could it be that ticket prices are too high?

McCarthy: The cost of tickets is overplayed.

Goodman: The Rand Corporation’s Kevin McCarthy...

McCarthy: It seems that, for many people who are not involved with the arts, the critical factor is they just don’t believe the arts have much to offer them.

Goodman: In a bid to show them what they’re missing, the American Symphony Orchestra League is producing a 30-second public service announcement to show the uninitiated what it’s really like to attend a concert. CEO Jack McAuliffe...

McAuliffe:: If they’ve never included it in their experiences before, they don’t know. A lot of what they see in the media...they’ll see an opening night where people tend to dress up more than they would for a normal concert. They see people applaud and not applaud and they wonder when the appropriate time is to do that. And they don’t want to make fools of themselves...

Goodman: The intimidation factor is real, according to Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Gwen Freed. She wrote a series of articles about accessibility to the arts in the Twin Cities.

Freed: We actually followed a woman who did not have a lot of education, had a $30,000 per year income and was supporting three kids on her own. And she found our local arts institutions to be intimidating and not comfortable for her. She even found the buildings kind of off-putting, cold and sort of formal looking.

Goodman: The Ohio Arts Council’s research also points to non-economic reasons for the lack of class diversity among high arts consumers. Executive Director Wayne Lawson...

Lawson:: For example, now, most museums around the state are free. But some people may not attend because they’re worrying about things like, “How is my child going to behave? Will I be embarrassed? Is there going to be a place to park for me? Should I go to that part of town?” Those become other kinds of barriers.

Goodman: Northeast Ohio arts organizations have found creative ways to bring down those barriers. To bring arts closer to the neighborhoods, and even to the farms, Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire, plays in churches and barns. The Ohio Ballet dances all over Akron’s parks for free every summer. And a local theater troop, the Sharonton Players, stages readings in cemeteries. And although ticket prices may not be a factor for low-income people who have already come to value the arts, free events in accessible locations help others find out what they’ve been missing. Events like Parade the Circle and Holiday Circlefest at University Circle, the Akron Symphony Picnic Pops concerts, the Akron Art Museum’s Downtown at Dusk and the Cleveland Orchestra’s Independence Day concerts at Public Square. This family hears the Orchestra every year at Public Square, but never makes it to Severance Hall.

Mom: We have nine children, so that’s not very possible.

Goodman: For her whole family to sit in ground floor seats for one concert in Severance Hall would cost, roughly, $550. At Blossom, though, lawn seating for children ages 6-12 is half price and for children 5 and under it is free. Mr. And Mrs. Chuck Victor of Akron go often.

Mr. Victor: You know, everyone can have an appreciation for classical.

Mrs. Victor: We bring our 10-year-old sometimes and its kind of neat to see him sit on the lawn and appreciate different music.

Goodman: Family-oriented events, free and low-cost tickets and easier access is helping democratize the arts, but there’s another factor keeping lower and middle classes out of high culture venues. Call it the “highbrow factor.” We examine that in part 2 of this feature.

P A R T  2

Goodman: The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the renovation of Blossom Music Center was an upscale, invitation-only affair for contributors and patrons of the orchestra, a decidedly “high brow” crowd...although few would admit to that label.

Robert Conrad: I wouldn’t say that I am a “high brow” per se, but I would say that I know a lot about a few things.

Conrad broadcast: This is Robert Conrad at the Blossom Music Center, from where we will bring you another broadcast concert of the Cleveland Orchestra...

Goodman: He may sound as if he were born to it, but Robert Conrad wasn’t always a classical announcer.

Conrad: People don’t know that I was a country and western announcer. I was known as “Sagebrush Bob” on a program called “Hayloft Jamboree.”

Goodman: Sagebrush Bob played what he calls traditional country and western: Bluegrass, Hank Williams, Gene Autry. He says he wouldn’t think of listening to country these days.

Conrad: Today, country and western is a completely different animal. It’s rock.

Goodman: Bob, do you tend to judge people by their taste?

Conrad: Well, birds of a feather flock together, and I certainly like to talk to people who know what I’m talking about.

Goodman: That would probably exclude the low-income woman Gwen Freed profiled in her Minneapolis Star Tribune series on accessibility to the arts. She told people that the elitism of the patrons of the arts made her feel unwelcome.

Freed: This particular woman that we worked with did feel that way. And also, too you sometimes wonder if the arts institutions themselves feel that it is in their best interests to pursue people of lesser means because, when you look at the individual sponsors to the arts that keep those organizations going, they are the most elite group in terms of their finances. They give the largest gifts and they have the largest per capita income, so they might feel it is in their best interest to have that niche clientele be very happy and comfortable.

Goodman: And that niche clientele may not lie rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi?

Freed: Well, yes.

Goodman: Snobbery is something Ray Brown has fought ever since he founded the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University more than 30 years ago. When he proposed the study of comic books along with Picasso, and soap operas along with Strindberg, he faced opposition on the Toledo campus from every department.

Brown: Art of course, and music, because it was looked upon...that classical music was a proper kind of thing. We had an inferiority complex. If I had been at Purdue or Ohio State or Harvard or Yale, I would have had no problem because it would have been recognized that what I was doing was a proper thing to do. But, at Bowling Green, we had the feeling that we wanted to be the highest class of all.

Goodman: In his book, “Nobrow,” The New Yorker’s John Seabrook argues that because of today’s global marketing, where the same mass market approach used to sell Britney Spears is the same used to sell the Three Tenors. It’s not the quality of the art that counts, but it’s “buzz” or “hotness.” And that is blurring the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture. Ray Brown agrees that that’s the trend, but not yet a reality.

Brown: It’s virtually impossible nowadays to try to lord it over someone else and prove superiority, except in the finest form of so-called “elite art.” As an example, classical music, you like it generally because you are familiar with it, can afford it and in some ways, it sets you off from the rest of the people.

Goodman: But Brown expects that in the next 25 years, distinctions between the elite and popular cultures will completely disappear.

Brown: Because we are coming more and more to realize that all culture is, in the essence, popular culture.

Goodman: Kent State journalism student Mandy Jenkins realizes it already. She says she looks forward to seeing elitism fade away. She’s run in to it a lot in her part-time job as a party DJ.

Jenkins: Since I moved to Northern Ohio, I get a lot of people that are like, “Country music? That’s hick music. That’s what farmers listen to.” And I’m like, “Well, I grew up on a farm, and yeah, that’s what my family listens to.” I have found a lot of people who kind of make assumptions about me because I like country, that maybe I’m just a hick, or they’re kind of surprised that someone in college would listen to country. That someone would even go to college if they liked country music. I don’t understand why, but it’s kind of strange.

Goodman: Mandy likes country, but she also loves classical. John Seabrook writes about his own eclectic taste in his book Nobrow. He loves hip-hop as well as opera. Brought up in an upper class family where his first crawl was on an Aubusson carpet, Seabrook writes that his parents taught him it isn’t polite to boast about your economic class, but your taste. That was the essential factor that distinguished a person of quality. But Seabrook didn’t agree, and neither does Mandy Jenkins—that your class has to dictate your tastes...at least not for her generation.

Jenkins: I think it does if you’re older. I mean, my parents have never listened to classical music. They like country. My dad likes old rock n’roll. And then there are people who probably have a lot more money than they do who live in bigger houses that like classical, who would never imagine listening to country music. But, with people my age, poor kids, just as much as rich kids, listen to rap music. I think that’s pretty much across the board. You’re going to find a kid that lives in Beachwood that likes Eminem just as much as someone that lives in East Cleveland. But I wonder if it will carry through when we get older, too. I mean, right now, we’re all kind of exposed to the same thing.

Goodman: Greater media exposure to the arts for today’s young people provides hope that the class divide in the arts will narrow. Rand Corporation Social Scientist Kevin McCarthy says the Internet might help too.

McCarthy: People won’t have to worry about geographic accessibility...that is living in the same town or having arts in the same neighborhood. They can get access to it anywhere. I think we’ll face a situation in which the class divide in the arts is much less pronounced but it may also mean that people are likely to get their arts through the media than they are through attending a live event, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Goodman: A brighter ray of hope for narrowing the cultural divide is that arts organizations are beginning to reach out with more diverse offerings. The Akron Art Museum brought in a very mixed crowd to its Japanese anime and Dale Chihuly glass art exhibitions. And the Cleveland Museum of Art scored a hit when it used former Cleveland Indians manager Mike Hargrove on its TV spots. Class barriers in the arts are being attacked on many fronts, but the greatest hope is for the next generation. The Ohio Arts Council reports that in a majority of Ohio schools, field trips to concerts and museums are still available, despite the hard economic times. And local arts organizations are stepping up. Ohio Ballet’s “Kid Steps” program is offered free to schools from 15 counties. Teachers nominate students for a nine-week playwriting program at the Cleveland Playhouse. Cleveland Opera has a program in which children create and perform their own operas. And students are invited to hear the Akron Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra for free many times a year. The children are discovering that, as Maestro Franz Welser-Möst notes, you don’t need money to love the arts.

Welser-Möst: The only thing you have to have is an open mind and an open heart. And that’s all it needs.