United States

By the beginning of the 21st century, the Super Bowl, professional football’s championship game, American sports’ gold standard of hype and commercial synergy, and the august “October classic,” Major League Baseball’s World Series, had been surpassed for many as a shared event by college basketball’s national championship. Mirroring a similar phenomenon on the high-school and state level, known popularly as March Madness, this single-elimination tournament whose early rounds feature David versus Goliath matchups and television coverage that shifts between a bevy of regional venues not only has been statistically proved to reduce the productivity of the American workers who monitor the progress of their brackets (predictions of winners and pairings on the way to the Final Four) but for a festive month both reminds the United States of its vanishing regional diversity and transforms the country into one gigantic community. In a similar way, the growth of fantasy baseball and football leagues—in which the participants “draft” real players—has created small communities while offering an escape, at least in fantasy, from the increasingly cynical world of commercial sports. Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Audiences

Art is made by artists, but it is possible only with audiences; and perhaps the most worrying trait of American culture in the past half century, with high and low dancing their sometimes happy, sometimes challenging dance, has been the threatened disappearance of a broad middlebrow audience for the arts. Many magazines that had helped sustain a sense of community and debate among educated readers—Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Look—had all stopped publishing by the late 20th century or continued only as a newspaper insert (Life). Others, including Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, continue principally as philanthropies.

As the elephantine growth and devouring appetite of television has reduced the middle audience, there has also been a concurrent growth in the support of the arts in the university. The public support of higher education in the United States, although its ostensible purposes were often merely pragmatic and intended simply to produce skilled scientific workers for industry, has had the perhaps unintended effect of making the universities into cathedrals of culture. The positive side of this development should never be overlooked; things that began as scholarly pursuits—for instance, the enthusiasm for authentic performances of early music—have, after their incubation in the academy, given pleasure to increasingly larger audiences. The growth of the universities has also, for good or ill, helped decentralize culture; the Guthrie Theaterin Minnesota, for instance, or the regional opera companies of St. Louis, Mo., and Santa Fe, N.M., are difficult to imagine without the support and involvement of local universities. But many people believe that the “academicization” of the arts has also had the negative effect of encouraging art made by college professors for other college professors. In literature, some people believe, for instance, this has led to the development of a literature that is valued less for its engagement with the world than for its engagement with other kinds of writing.

Yet a broad, middle-class audience for the arts, if it is endangered, continues to flourish too. The establishment of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the early 1960s provided a model for subsequent centres across the country, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., which opened in l971. It is sometimes said, sourly, that the audiences who attend concerts and recitals at these centres are mere “consumers” of culture, rather than people engaged passionately in the ongoing life of the arts. But it seems probable that the motives that lead Americans to the concert hall or opera house are just as mixed as they have been in every other historical period: a desire for prestige, a sense of duty, and real love of the form all commingled together.

New York City BalletThe New York City Ballet performing a revival of George Balanchine's 1949 staging of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Firebird, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, 2012.Andrea Mohin—The New York Times/Redux