When Royal Opera House chief executive, Tony Hall, announced last year that the venue planned to offer cheap tickets to opera and ballet performances the scoffing that greeted the announcement could be heard across the country.
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is offering 100 top price tickets every Monday for half the season for £10. The seats will be sold online, one and a half hours before the performance and is sponsored by foreign exchange company Travelex (at a cost of £1 million over three years). The cheap seats represent a saving of up to £155 for opera and £60 for ballet.
The condemnation was not prompted by disagreement with the principle of low cost tickets to one of Britain’s proudest cultural institutions (although it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine a bevy of white-haired ROH regulars muttering ‘who let the oiks in’ over a cheeky gin during the interval); the concern was over the insensitivity, and alleged inaccuracy of Mr Hall’s assertion that, according to a BBC News report, the cheap-tickets promotion was part of a strategy to make the ROH ‘a place where “anyone and everyone can come and feel welcome and enjoy world class opera and ballet”.’
At the time the Institute of Public Policy Research (ippr) said the measures being introduced would ‘do little to encourage engagement with the arts from the less well off.’ Ian Kearns, ippr Associate Director, pointed out that if greater inclusivity was really the aim, “It would be far better for the Opera House to give away tickets to community groups in deprived areas and to arrange trips for lower socio-economic groups outside of London.”
ippr pointed out that the associated costs (transport and accommodation) for anyone from outside the capital attending one of the discounted performances would turn the cheap offer into an expensive sojourn. Furthermore, because the tickets are only available online, anyone purchasing them would have to have access to a computer connected to the Internet – not something most poor people have in their home.
Kearns also referred to the moral/social argument, contained in ippr’s For Art’s Sake: Society and the Arts in the 21st Century report, that businesses ought to support the arts as part of the Corporate Social Responsibility Agenda not just through sponsorship as a means of marketing and brand promotion – as with the Royal Opera House and Travelex – or when businesses wish to bring artists into their company to deliver courses for their staff.
ippr’s criticism of the Royal Opera House continued with reference to the Arts Council’s survey Arts in England: attendance, participation and attitudes in 2001 – the first survey of public attitudes, attendance and participation in the arts for over a decade. The data collected from over 6000 participants indicated that of those who don’t regularly attend arts events (predominately lower social class) lack of interest was the main reason given for non-attendance at cultural events (39%), lack of time was second (33%) with cost third (25%). So even if the ROH really had lowered ticket prices to get the poor through the door, it wouldn’t have worked because they aren’t interested.
But according to new research published earlier this month by the brainiacs at Oxford University, it isn’t just the poor who don’t give a damn. In fact, when trying to identify who consumes culture the most, economic status can almost (but not quite) be seen as a bit of a red herring.
In their report, Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption, Tak Wing Chan and John Goldthorpe of the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, argue that cultural consumers are drawn from all levels of society and that people with a penchant for ‘mass culture’ (e.g. recorded music) are equally disposed towards liking and attending ‘high arts’ events, such as museum exhibitions. And even though those with the largest appetite for the ‘high arts’ are drawn from higher social strata, ‘they still constitute only a small minority even within these strata—although without forming any kind of social elite. And within the highest strata it is not economic status that determines whether one goes to the opera or attends the latest gallery opening, it is education.
The researchers analysis of statistics concerning attendance of visual arts events, obtained through the Arts Council survey, Arts in England: attendance, participation and attitudes in 2001, indicates that the largest consumers of ‘high arts’ ‘tend to be somewhat more advantaged in their educational attainments but somewhat less well placed economically.’ This, say Chan and Goldthorpe, supports the idea ‘that distinctive cultural consumption, and perhaps in the visual arts especially, is a means of establishing and maintaining status that is favoured by occupational groupings within generally more advantaged classes, such as lower-level professionals, whose balance of cultural and economic resources is better suited to this strategy than to one based upon distinctive material consumption.’
In other words, those who aspire to be like the very rich attend ‘high arts’ events, which they believe (seemingly erroneously) to be cherished by their peers. Thus the Royal Opera House’s cheap tickets promotion must have been a godsend for the middle classes with aspirations beyond their station. The poor, meanwhile, were probably unaware of the promotion (given that the marketing was directed at would-be customers of Travelex products). The fact that the promotion was being sponsored by Travelex following the success of a similar promotion with the National Theatre, possibly proves the point. After all, businesses aren’t in the habit of penetrating audiences that don’t fit their marketing demographic.
And therein lies the problem. As long as cheap tickets only exist as a result of sponsorship by companies trying to reach their target market, it is a simple matter of fact that the poor will not be the audience/market in mind.
