Fewer people are going to movies, theater and museums, NEA study shows (2024)

In addition to drawing on the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the NEA’s research also cited the 2022 General Social Survey, which was administered by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. That survey found that 82 percent of respondents watched or listened to arts activities through digital platforms between 2021 and 2022, suggesting a robust online engagement that persisted even as in-person events returned.

“The National Endowment for the Arts has a longstanding commitment to providing the arts and culture field and the general public with accurate and relevant research,” NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson said in a statement. “Taken together, these reports help to reveal the state of arts participation in our country.”

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which sampled 40,718 U.S. adults at a roughly 59 percent response rate, found nearly universal declines in fine arts attendance from 2017 to 2022. The adults who reported seeing a musical theater production fell from about 17 percent to 10 percent; the number for nonmusical plays dropped from about 9 percent to 5 percent. Attendance for ballet, opera and classical music performances saw similarly dramatic decreases.

Although visual arts also experienced drop-offs, the rate of change wasn’t as proportionally drastic. The number of respondents who reported visiting an art museum or gallery shrank from about 24 percent to 18 percent, while those attending craft fairs or visual arts festivals declined from about 24 percent to 17 percent. But those who said they toured parks, buildings or neighborhoods for “historic or design value” fell only two percentage points (to 26 percent).

Social media (17 percent) was the most common tool people reported using to discover arts events they ultimately attended, followed by friends, neighbors or co-workers (about 15 percent) and print/broadcast media (about 11 percent).

The survey also found that about 43 percent of respondents reported going to the movies — about a 16 percentage point decrease from 2017 — though the numbers predated the blockbuster release of “Avatar: The Way of Water” this past winter and this summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon. That decline grew steeper among people with higher levels of education, including an approximately 24 percentage point plunge for moviegoers with a graduate or professional degree. The number of people who said they read a book dwindled four points, to about 49 percent.

One area of increase was “other performing arts,” which the survey noted could encompass pop, rock, hip-hop and country music concerts, comedy shows and circus acts. That number rose about six points, to around 21 percent.

The General Social Survey, which documented the high levels of online arts engagement, found that White people were the least likely ethnic demographic to engage with the arts digitally, at 64 percent, compared with 81 percent of Black respondents, 73 percent of Hispanic respondents and 89 percent of other ethnicities. Women, 18-to-24-year-olds and minorities reported participating in more virtual arts events in the second year of the pandemic than they did from March 2020 to March 2021.

Unsurprisingly, young adults reported higher rates of engaging with digital arts activities: 95 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds, compared with 68 percent of people 75 and older.

The pessimistic in-person numbers validate existing anxieties among arts leaders. The Washington Post reported this past summer that 25 to 30 percent of theater audiences have not returned since the shutdown, according to experts in theater management. After movie theaters enjoyed five straight years of hitting $11 billion at the domestic box office, from 2015 to 2019, the total gross was only $7.3 billion in 2022, according to the tracking website Box Office Mojo.