Report: Artists Face Challenge of Smaller Audiences in Post-Pandemic America

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Endowment for the Arts has unveiled research highlighting a rough development for how Americans engage with artists. 

The findings from the NEA's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts indicate that many American adults are attending fewer cultural activities — such as classical music concerts, theater productions, and movies — than before the pandemic.

The survey, which sampled 40,718 U.S. adults, reported that only 48 percent of adults attended at least one arts event from July 2021 to July 2022. 

This number marks a six-point decline compared to the 2017 survey, raising concerns of how artists can regain their pre-pandemic audiences.

The decline in in-person attendance was reflected across various fine arts categories. Attendees of musical theater productions dropped from 17 percent to 10 percent, nonmusical plays decreased from 9 percent to 5 percent, and ballet, opera, and classical music performances experienced similar declines.

Visual artists are also feeling a drop-off — though it was not as proportionally drastic. The number of respondents visiting art museums or galleries decreased from 24 percent to 18 percent, while those attending craft fairs or visual arts festivals dropped from 24 percent to 17 percent.

A notable exception to the decline was the category of "other performing arts," including pop, rock, hip-hop, and country music concerts, comedy shows, and circus acts. That category saw a six-point increase to approximately 21 percent of respondents having attended at least one event in the last year. 

While in-person attendance is down in general, the research also highlights a meaningful shift toward digital engagement with the arts. 

The 2022 General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, reveals that 82 percent of respondents watched or listened to arts activities through online platforms between 2021 and 2022. This data suggests that online arts engagement continues to thrive even as in-person events return.

The research also revealed differences in digital arts engagement among ethnic groups, with White individuals being the least likely to engage digitally at 64 percent, compared to 81 percent of Black respondents, 73 percent of Hispanic respondents, and 89 percent of other ethnicities.

Social media emerged as the most common tool for discovering arts events, with 17 percent of respondents reporting its use. That’s followed by recommendations from friends, neighbors, or co-workers at 15 percent, and print/broadcast media at 11 percent.

As artists navigate this evolving landscape, it’s becoming more clear that adapting to changing audience preferences is an important consideration.

Some other interesting nuggets from the report include the rate at which Americans are creating art: 

• 52% of the nation’s adults did some form of art making in 2022. This is similar to the share of adults who, using a different set of measures, reported creating and/or performing art in 2017.

• For most art forms, the share of adults personally creating and/or performing has either grown modestly or held flat since 2017. Art making activities that showed growth from 2017 included leatherwork, metalwork, and woodwork. and playing musical instruments. Other activities, such as working with textiles, taking artistic photos, or doing creative writing, took a dip in 2020 but have since returned to 2017 levels.

• Social dancing is the most popular activity across all forms of personal arts performance and creation, involving 22 percent of adults.

• The next most popular activity is singing, whether alone or in a choir, though the proportion of adults singing declined by five percentage points from 2017 to 2022.

• Other declines in personal creation and performance included performing or practicing dance; restoring, rebuilding, or customizing objects; and cooking as an artistic activity.

• Most adults who learned an arts subject did so through friends or family, or by teaching oneself.