Famed British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham decamped to Seattle for a short time in the 1940s, serving as conductor of the Seattle Symphony. In 1941 he expressed his worry that unless it got its act together, this obscure backwater would remain an “aesthetic dustbin.” Few in the Seattle cultural scene will recall much of anything about Beecham himself, but everyone seems to know about the dustbin thing.
Well, how have we done in the past 80 years? Has Seattle become a cultural capital? When measuring artistic and cultural activities in the broadest sense, the answer is, unfortunately, no. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases an annual assessment of arts and cultural activity in the country, including estimates of the share of state GDP that is accounted for by various activities. The figure below shows the top ten states, plus the nation and Washington, for concentration of five principal cultural industries. The BEA study is based on 2017 data.
Washington actually ranks 32nd on the list, tied with Ohio, for share of state GDP in these activities.
Now, if you had made your way to Column B of Table 3-a of Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account 2017, you would have been delighted to see Washington ranked NUMBER 1 in total arts and cultural production as a share of state GDP. But a little further investigation would have led you to Table 3-b, column E, “publishing.” And, yes, publishing includes not only the latest literary fiction, but also software publishing. So, remove that, and other IT services that somehow get categorized in arts and culture, and Washington plunges to No. 32.
Washington is a relatively large and very productive state, so looking at total output for these five sectors, we jump up to Number 17, with about $105 million in output in 2017. But that amounts to only 0.7 percent of the national total output. These industries are highly concentrated, with California accounting for 45 percent of national output and New York accounting for 21 percent. Number 3, Tennessee, accounts for less than 4 percent of national output.
Dustbin? When it comes to quality, certainly not, and Beecham would have known that back in 1941, had he looked around a bit. When it comes to quantity, though, Washington is not much of a player.
No activity has been hit harder during the pandemic than the broad entertainment/sports sector. For better or worse, that sector is just not very big in Washington, so while the the effects of its almost complete shutdown will be devastating on the individual artists and workers, and disappointing to patrons, the macro impacts will not be large.
As our new quasi-official voice on what the stats say and don’t say, I’m glad to see you covering the subject. But there’s a problem trying to quantify culture.
North America in 1941 was probably more “cultured” per capita than Beecham thought; probably more than Great Britain at the time. But it was a different kind of culture, home, family-, church- and public school-centered.
Beecham (despite his origins in the manufacturing class) had a patrician European view of what constitutes culture: professional orchestras, theaters, art museums, conservatories–institutions, in short. By his lights, probably only half a dozen places in America weren’t “dust” and a yard wide: New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, . . maybe New Orleans; not Washington D.C. certainly not Los Angeles . . .
In 1941, Seattle had a couple of respectable small museums, an aspiring school of the arts, several live theaters hosting touring Broadway productions and a home-grown repertory company devoted to more ambitious fare. Its orchestra was respectable though its season was short and its personnel not fully professional. In 1941 “the Northwest school” was just making its way onto the national visual art scene. Beecham’s characterization was unjust and spiteful. (A dust-bin In Great Britain is just a plain “garbage can.”)
What about today? They numbers don’t lie about the modest economic contribution of the sector. What they misrepresent is the esteem in which professional artists elsewhere hold our native institutions: the Seattle Symphony has had ups and down over its 90-plus years, but the last decade saw it explode into the top ranks of world orchestras. Seattle Opera was a significant force in its field for more than 40 years, nationally and occasionally beyond.
During the same period live theater boomed so remarkably, both in quantity and quality, that it became a net exporter of acting, designing, and directing talent. World-class choreographers Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Mark Morris all hail from hereabouts, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet is considered one of the three or four finest in the land.
Well before the plague hit town, those highs were under stress. It remains to be seen if much survives of the achievements of those years. It’s poor comfort to realize that other, grander enterprises across the continent and abroad are suffering even more.
What is not suffering, nor ever will is Art. Human beings incessantly make it. They can’t stop. When times are good, some people make it and sell it to other people who get a contact high from being around it. When times a bad, they trade it, give it away, or pile it up behind closed doors to wait for a sunny day. Sooner or later things get sunny enough to support art’s parasites: the critics, curators and collectors, So it goes. And numbers will never tell its story.