Category: One Story: Some Context

Ticket bots are the scourge of the live performance business. For popular shows, automated ticket purchasing programs buy up all the tickets within moments of them becoming available, then scalp them for a profit. For really popular shows, the scalping prices (er…secondary market prices) can be several multiples higher than the face value. This all but ensures that only the wealthy can afford to buy. Since the shows themselves don’t make any extra from the scalper sales, the scalpers take the profits. The only ones who benefit are rich ticket-buyers who can afford the higher prices. Lin Manuel-Miranda says the bots will ruin Broadway and has been campaigning for legislation to outlaw bots.

Now he’s got it, as the US Congress has passed legislation to ban bots from circumventing

…the security measures of ticketing websites, which bots often do, and would give enforcement authority to the Federal Trade Commission… Ticketmaster has estimated that bots have been used to buy 60 percent of the most desirable tickets to many shows.

But in a fight between legislation and technology, you can usually bet on technology finding ways around the rules.

The world of bots is shadowy and little understood, with much of the software being developed and even operated overseas, complicating enforcement. And there is an enormous incentive for scalping, which is legal and now largely integrated into the mainstream concert business through sites like StubHub and even Ticketmaster.

So what’s the solution? Aside from banning scalping altogether, there will be abuses, and that’s not likely.

While few spoke against the BOTS Act — the National Association of Ticket Brokers, which bars bots among its members, welcomed the bill — ticket scalping has become a standard part of the entertainment economy, and services like StubHub are often welcomed by fans for their convenience. Economists frequently endorse secondary markets as a true demonstration of supply and demand.

We like to talk about an “arts community” as if it’s really a thing, but in fact, art is a very personal experience, and people tend to be fans of who they like rather than the art form generally. They go to specific artists or plays or museums. New music fans aren’t necessarily interested in baroque music or opera or Mozart. The audience that shows up for the ballet is completely different from the one that goes to fringe theatre.

A study by TRG Arts of Washington DC theatre puts some numbers to the silo-ization of the city’s theatre audience. Though the number of people going to theatre generally in DC is up significantly over a decade…

The results pointed to a 13 percent increase in theatergoing households and a 25 percent increase in households buying single tickets. It even showed that D.C. theater outpaces the national rate of getting audiences to buy subscriptions — the companies realized a 20 percent increase during the decade in question.

… about 85 percent of the theatre audience goes only to a single theatre. In other words, they’re loyal to the place or company they like rather than the art form writ general. Each of the seven theatres TRG tracked has a specific profile:

Even beyond the core seven troupes that TRG studied, Washington theaters make it their business to be different — in style, in size and in price. Finding the portals to smoothly propel audiences from one stage to another is the ongoing challenge.

So when we talk about “the arts community” what is it we actually mean?

Economist Tyler Cowen has some suggestions for how he thinks national arts policy in the United States could improve under a Trump Republican Congress. A futile hope? Here were Cowen’s criteria:

First, they must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, they should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, they should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the U.S., and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes.

You’ve got to admire the effort to find the positive. Others have argued the arts could be a natural target since artists aren’t exactly in the sweet spot of Trump’s constituency. Federal arts funding has never recovered since the culture wars of the 1990s and it’s highly unlikely that the Republican Congress will increase that funding, no matter how small it is. But at a policy level, Cowen does have some interesting suggestions, basically proposing restoring restrictions put on the NEA at the time the budget was cut. He suggests restoring the NEA’s ability to fund individual artists, a punitive action meant to restrict funding controversial art. And he suggests killing the requirement that the NEA send 40 percent of its budget to state arts agencies so they can “regrant” it. This, he reasons, would give the feds more control of the money.

Restoring individual grants would be hugely popular in the arts community. But it’s difficult to tell if there would be support for removing the 40 percent state allocation. On the one hand, it would give the NEA more bang for its bucks, and the NEA is much more sophisticated in its operations than many state arts agencies. On the other hand, with so much emphasis in recent years on artists being more responsive to their communities, one could make the case that local agencies have a better sense of what their communities need.

ArtsJournal blogger Michael Rushton argues that:

“Whether you agree with his advice or not, he does raise an important issue: arts policy in the US at the federal and state level lack clear goals, and as such rigorous evaluation of the success, or failure, of their policies is near impossible. That in turn explains why the academic literature on arts policy in the US is so uncritical. What is there to criticize? What is the NEA, and in turn the state arts councils it helps to fund, trying to achieve? Without knowing that, it is not possible to evaluate whether transferring such a high percentage of federal arts funding to the states is actually a good use of funds.”

We may be at the beginning of a critical debate about what constitutes essential infrastructure in this country – what are the things that are public goods but aren’t viable as private capitalist enterprises. Trump says he’ll spend a trillion dollars on public infrastructure, but there are signs his idea is not so much to finance construction and modernization but to privatize and create tax incentives. Are the arts a public good? If even our bridges and roads are about to be privatized to pay for their rebuilding, it’s difficult to imagine the case Trump and the Republicans would make that they are.

Ottawa’s National Arts Center has spent the past eight years raising $23 million so it could give the money away. Why? The NAC is a performing arts center, a presenter and home to several of the Canadian capital’s biggest arts groups. But it hasn’t been a traditional funder. At a time when arts groups are scrambling to support their own operations, why raise money to fund other artists’ work, particularly when it might never see your own stages?

It’s a brilliant move, actually. There are many ways to have impact in your field. Certainly producing or presenting great work is one of them. But there’s also tremendous power in being a convener of ideas and people, a connector of resources or an investor in work that you like. Engaging in artistic conversations with other artists and institutions outside your own walls broadens and challenges your own work.

How do you build constituency for your aesthetic? The aesthetic you produce on your own stages might not travel much beyond your building, even if it gets critical acclaim. But funding artists and work beyond your own fingertips extends your influence and promotes your ideas. It’s a bold bid for artistic leadership that extends NAC’s reach well beyond Ottawa.

“We’re looking for bold, compelling works that have a strong artistic team, a strong producing partner and ambitions to be national or international,” said Heather Moore, the veteran NAC artistic producer who will run the NAC’s new National Creation Fund. “This is not about the germ of an idea that doesn’t yet have a potential life. We’re talking about filling in that mid-development stage of a project that’s brewing, and that already has somebody intent on putting it on the stage.”

The main idea,NAC president and CEO Peter Herrndorf said, is to put enough cash into the hands of artists to make an exponential difference in artistic outcomes. “We want to get as much of that money into artists’ hands as possible, as quickly as possible,” he said.

– Douglas McLennan