The Pandemic's Impact on Arts Attendance: Report from the NEA

The Arts Participation Patterns in 2022, is a report released by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) analyzing the results of the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

The report explores how American adults participated in various arts activities over a 12-month period ending in July 2022, including attending arts events, creating art, reading books, and consuming art through digital media. The document highlights key findings, demographic differences in attendance rates, and provides an overview of the survey's methodology. The report also examines trends in arts participation, particularly in comparison to previous SPPA surveys conducted in 2017 and 2012.

One of the most striking findings is the overall decline in arts attendance. Compared to 2017, the rate dropped by almost six percentage points.

Attendance at performing arts events not specifically listed in the survey actually rose. This category, which encompasses genres like rock, folk, country, rap, hip-hop, comedy, improv, magic shows, and circus acts, saw participation grow to 21 percent of adults. This suggests a potential shift in audience preferences towards more diverse and non-traditional art forms.

The survey also highlighted the growing influence of social media in promoting arts events. Over 17 percent of adults reported first learning about an event they attended through social media, while 15 percent learned through friends, neighbors, or coworkers. This underscores the importance of digital platforms for arts organizations seeking to connect with audiences and build excitement for their programming.

Book readership, unfortunately, continued its downward trend. Fewer than 50 percent of adults reported reading any book in the past year, a decline of four and six points from 2017 and 2012, respectively. Novels and short stories experienced a particularly steep drop, with the reading rate diminishing by 17 percent over the past decade. This decline is concerning, raising questions about the future of literature and the factors contributing to this trend.

While the 2022 SPPA reveals a mixed landscape for arts participation, it offers valuable insights into the evolving ways Americans engage with the arts. The data underscores the resilience of art making, the growing importance of digital platforms, and the potential shift in audience preferences towards more diverse and accessible art forms. As the arts sector continues to recover from the pandemic, understanding these trends is crucial for developing strategies to promote participation and ensure the arts remain a vital part of American life.

Breaking (when it means dance, not news): Links

Years ago when I worked at Ballet Hispanico I saw a dancer rehearsing wearing a t-shirt that read "I'm not a tomboy, I'm an athlete". The phrase stuck with me. I remember thinking that a variation of the shirt could easily be "I’m an athlete because I’m a dancer."

Since Breaking was announced as the latest addition to the Olympics that phrase has been on my mind. I've been pleased to see so much conversation on my feeds with Breaking being about joyful, curious, exciting subjects instead of the latest in news mayhem.

• B-Girl Ami Yuasa wins first-ever breaking Olympic gold medal. (YouTube)

• B-Boy Phil Wizard claims inaugural men's breaking gold at Paris Olympics. (YouTube)

• How Breaking Went From a Street Dance to an Olympic Sport. This summer, 32 athletes will compete in what's commonly known as breakdancing, a dance sport that combines athleticism and artistry. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Dance Leads the Way as Art Meets Sport at the Cultural Olympiad. A program of arts events shown in conjunction with the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games looks at the relationship between art and sport. (New York Times)

• Fantastic feature explaining Breaking: More than 50 years since its inception, BREAKING will debut as an Olympic sport in Paris, where B-boys and B-girls will vie for gold and glory. (New York Times)

• How Will Breaking Be Scored at the Olympics? A panel of nine judges will apply Olympic rules to the dance form that originated as a free-flowing expression of hip-hop culture. (New York Times)

• What if All Dance Forms Were Considered Equal? At the Palais Garnier, ballet met hip-hop and beyond in a glittering Cultural Olympiad presentation of Saïdo Lehlouh's ever-evolving "Apaches." (New York Times)

• Once Sidelined, Breaking's B-Girls Now Throw Down at Center Stage. Women are competing in breaking in greater numbers and, thanks to better training and more opportunities, with more dynamic moves. (New York Times)

• The Surprise of the Olympics: Breakers' Delight. Breaking was invented by Black and brown kids, mostly male, in the Bronx in the 1970s. That it made Olympic history by opening with B-girls was everything. The logic of introducing breaking as a new competitive event aside, these female competitors, with their B-girl spirit and ethos, pulled the Olympic Games into the global here and now. (New York Times)

• A Viewer's Guide to Breaking at the Olympics. (Dance Magazine)

• Judging Breaking at the Olympics Is an Art, Not a Science. Breaking debuts as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games. To get there, the breaking community had to figure a way to objectively judge the subjective, while letting the dance remain a dance. (Wired)

• Don't Think Breakdancing Is a 'Real' Olympic Sport? The World Champ Agrees (Kinda) Phil Wizard, the current favorite for Olympic Gold, says it's an art and culture first. But if you're gonna hate, he'd like you to at least learn the proper terminology. (Wired)

• Poetry Was an Official Olympic Event for Nearly 40 Years. What Happened? Pierre de Coubertin hoped the modern Games would encourage the ancient Greek notion of harmony between "muscle and mind." (Smithsonian Magazine)

Brains, Servers, Ships, Thinking: Links

In the BBC’s podcast The Digital Human Aleks Krotoski explores the digital world and how it affects humanity. Recently they launched a spin-off podcast, The Artificial Human, where Krotoski and Kevin Fong answer the questions we're all asking about AI. Their more recent episode Can we stop saying AI can think inspired this collection of links:

• What is thought and how does thinking manifest in the brain? - We can describe different kinds of thought and how they arise, to some extent, but the relationship between neural activity and the nature of what we are thinking isn't well understood. (Scientific American)

• Frozen human brain tissue was successfully revived for the first time - In a groundbreaking development, scientists have discovered a new technique that allows human brain tissue to be frozen and thawed while maintaining its normal function. (BGR)

• Scientists Imaged and Mapped a Tiny Piece of Human Brain. Here’s What They Found - With the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm, the researchers produced 1.4 million gigabytes of data from a cubic millimeter of brain tissue. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Designing a Workflow For Thinking - We’re living in a golden age of tools for thought. But with so many options, it’s important to carve out time every year or two for a “creative inventory” of how you discover and organize your ideas. (Steven Johnson’s Adjacent Possible Substack)

• Neuralink’s First User Is ‘Constantly Multitasking’ With His Brain Implant - Noland Arbaugh is the first to get Elon Musk’s brain device. The 30-year-old speaks to WIRED about what it’s like to use a computer with his mind—and gain a new sense of independence. (Wired)

• Single brain implant restores bilingual communication to paralyzed man - Bilingual AI brain implant helps stroke survivor communicate in Spanish and English. The implant uses a form of AI to turn the man's brain activity into sentences, allowing him to participate in a bilingual conversation and "switch between languages." (Are Technica)

• Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model - Anthropic announced a new research breakthrough in understanding the black box of how AI models work. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model. This interpretability discovery could, in future, help us make AI models safer. (Anthropic)

• Google Eats Rocks, a Win for A.I. Interpretability and Safety Vibe Check - “Pass me the nontoxic glue and a couple of rocks, because it’s time to whip up a meal with Google’s new A.I. Overviews.” Josh Batson, a researcher at the A.I. startup Anthropic, joins the Hard Fork podcast to explain how an experiment that made the chatbot Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge represents a major breakthrough in understanding how large language models work. (Hard Fork)

• Google’s broken link to the web - With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background. (Platformer)

• Why ChatGPT feels more “intelligent” than Google Search - Artificial intelligence caught the public’s imagination when OpenAI released its GPT-4-powered chatbot in 2023. For many users, ChatGPT feels like a true AI compared to other tools such as Google Search. In this op-ed, Philip L, the creator of the AI Explained YouTube channel, explains why he thinks new video interfaces will give people a sense of AI as a “thing” rather than a “tool.” (Big Think)

• With spatial intelligence, AI will understand the real world - In the beginning of the universe, all was darkness — until the first organisms developed sight, which ushered in an explosion of life, learning and progress. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li says a similar moment is about to happen for computers and robots. She shows how machines are gaining "spatial intelligence" — the ability to process visual data, make predictions and act upon those predictions — and shares how this could enable AI to interact with humans in the real world. (TED)

• AI is cracking a hard problem – giving computers a sense of smell - Research on machine olfaction faces a formidable challenge due to the complexity of the human sense of smell. Whereas human vision mainly relies on receptor cells in the retina – rods and three types of cones – smell is experienced through about 400 types of receptor cells in the nose. (The Conversation)

• The Cloud Under The Sea - The internet is carried around the world by hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean. These fragile wires are constantly breaking - a precarious system on which everything from banks to goverments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. This is the story of the people who repair the world’s most important infrastructure. (The Verge)

• What ideas in computer science are universally considered good? - Programmers love arguing for their favorite technologies. C++ vs Rust. Mac vs PC. These arguments overshadow the victories of Computer Science — the ideas that we all agree on. (Daniel Hooper)

• The Ambling Mind - Meditations on the virtues of walking. Kierkegaard “walked himself into a state of well-being”; Nietzsche felt that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. Travel writer Nick Hunt, reflecting on his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul, noted that walking turned the world into a continuum. “One thing merges into the next: cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum.” (The Convivial Society)

In Your Head: Links

• Innovative three-year-olds expose the limits of AI chatbots
New experiments show that very young children are better at solving creative puzzles than ChatGPT and other AI models. (Psyche)

• This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything
When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years ago inspired a raft of research into networks of brain regions and how they interact with each other. (Wired)

• Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference.
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” (Quanta)

Immersive Experiences: Links

• Tribeca Games and Immersive 2023: How are immersive technologies changing the way we tell, view, and perceive compelling stories? (Wunderman Thompson Intelligence)

•  Vision Pro: What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025. (Benedict Evans)

• Early Stats from the General Social Survey: How Virtual Arts Participation Fared in 2022: The arts module of the 2022 GSS was designed to track various types of arts activity among adults in the U.S. Unlike previous surveys, the module includes many questions about virtual participation in arts events. The module also asked respondents whether, at the time of the survey, they were taking part in such activities more or less often than when the pandemic was in its first year. (Arts Journal Blogs)

• NASA Is Behind New York’s Newest Immersive Art Show: The federal space agency has a surprisingly long history of art collaborations. (Observer)

• Some quick notes on Apple’s Vision Pro by Andy Matuschak: The hardware seems faintly unbelievable—a computer as powerful as Apple’s current mid-tier laptops (M2), plus a dizzying sensor/camera array with dedicated co-processor, plus displays with 23M 6µm pixels (my phone: 3M 55µm pixels; the PSVR2 is 32µm) and associated optics, all in roughly a mobile phone envelope.
But that kind of vertical integration is classic Apple. I’m mainly interested in the user interface and the computing paradigm. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it? (Andy’s working notes)

• Olfactory Overload: How it feels to have hyperosmia, a heightened sensitivity to smells, which can accompany autism. (The Polyphony)

• How your brain stays focused on conversations in a noisy room: The brain processes voices differently depending on the volume of the speaker and if the listener is focused on them. (New Scientist)

• Why Being in Nature Makes You Smarter, According to Neuroscientists: The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: spending time outdoors boosts your brain function. (Outside)

• Why VR Photography Could Be the Next Big Thing: Pictures that let you see more; Apple’s new Vision Pro headset lets you take immersive photos and video; Canon is showing off a camera that lets you take 360-degree shots; The new technologies could boost the popularity of virtual reality photography. (Lifewire)