Income, social class and disability status have little or no significant effect on arts attendance, according to a report issued by Arts Council England (ACE) this month. Education levels and social status are the most important factors in determining whether somebody attends arts activities, while gender, ethnicity, age, region, having young children and health also determine the likelihood of this. The report concludes that the barriers to arts attendance are both practical and psychological, with many people believing that the arts are ‘not for people like me’. It recommends that ACE should tackle both types of barrier but warns that even if these are successfully reduced or removed, there will still be some people who choose not to engage in the types of arts activities that typically receive public funding.
‘From indifference to enthusiasm: patterns of arts attendance in England’ is the result of a collaboration between ACE and two sociologists from Oxford University to analyse data from ‘Taking Part’, an annual survey of cultural participation. Catherine Bunting, Director of Research at ACE, told AP that the survey, instigated three years ago by the DCMS with the support of ACE, Sport England, English Heritage and the Museum Libraries and Archives Council, offered “the biggest data we’ve ever had on cultural participation”. Using statistical analysis to find basic patterns in arts attendance data, the report also identifies four types of attender appetites for the arts across the adult population: ‘Little if anything’, ‘Now and then’, ‘Enthusiastic’ and ‘Voracious’. Findings show that only 4% of the population can be classed as ‘Voracious’, while 84% fall into the first two categories, attending occasionally or not at all. The report also notes that “there does not appear to be any evidence of a cultural elite that engage with ‘high art’ rather than popular culture”. Quoting the McMaster Report, which stated that ‘to be excellent, the arts must be relevant’, the report asks “if non-engagement with the arts became solely a matter of lifestyle choice, or ‘self-exclusion’… the state [should] still intervene?”. It puts forward the possibility that “public money could be used in the future to support arts activities and experiences of a very different nature… If large numbers of people are self-excluding… we should consider the extent to which current arts provision is indeed relevant to people’s lives.”