This was the keynote address to the Association of Cultural Economists International (a very good group, sadly not enough Americans attend); the very able Michael Rushton summarizes some parts of it. His end take:
Will these innovations kill the live performing arts? He doesn’t think
so: doing lots of stuff on the web probably cuts into the time we might
have spent passively in front of the TV, but at the end of the day we
want to go out and about. Museum visits are rising, not falling.
Tyler, do you have a source for the idea that museum visits are rising? All museums? Or art museums? I’m somewhat skeptical with regards to natural history museums…
I’ve wondered about the appeal of my local natural history museum to show what a dinosaur or an 18th century city or a bison looks like… seems like movies and tv can communicate that much better today. Plus, for 75% of the museum, the exhibits are unchanging… not much incentive for repeat visits. Has live theater attendance declined or increased since the advent of the tv? Certainly as a percentage of entertainment consumed, it must have fallen.
A 2006 Fortune article on movie theaters reported:
“Back in 1946, buttressed by the appeal of newsreels, movie theaters sold some four billion tickets in the U.S., at a time when the total population was 141 million. That’s 28 movies a year, on average, for each and every American.
“But in the 1950s television began to gnaw away at movies’ stranglehold on entertainment, and by 1973 ticket sales fell to 864 million. While attendance has climbed since – to 1.4 billion tickets last year – it still pales in comparison with old times. With the U.S. population now around 300 million, the average American goes to the movies less than five times a year.”
Cultural goods due to innovations shape our thinking,experience and leisure time.We think that we are living in a most modern state of affairs.Centuries back, Smith was also very proud about the “modern” world in which he live and commented about old world as “in that rude state of affairs”.An individual in the twenty second century with super-super cultural goods might mock at us and would describe our conditions of life as “that rude state of affairs”.Does it mean that modernity is a difficult word to define?
Depending on your exact definitions, I went to two museums for father’s day. This morning I was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and this afternoon I was at the Winchester Mystery House.
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