The Wall Street Journal-20080202-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Leisure - Arts -- Sightings- When Lowbrows Subsidize Highbrows- In a Pop-Culture World- Who Pays the High-Culture Piper-

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Leisure & Arts -- Sightings: When Lowbrows Subsidize Highbrows; In a Pop-Culture World, Who Pays the High-Culture Piper?

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THE ATLANTA SYMPHONY Orchestra is building a new outdoor theater -- but not for classical music. The 12,000-seat Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park, located across Highway 400 from a suburban shopping mall, is set to open May 10 with a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. From then on, though, it will present an undemanding mix of rock concerts, Broadway musicals and similar events. Go to the "Verizon Wireless Encore Park" page on the ASO Web site and you'll find an ad for a concert by the Eagles. After opening night, the orchestra's presence in Encore Park will mostly be limited to providing backup for pop acts.

What's going on here? Has the debt-ridden ASO sold out to the malign forces of rock 'n' roll? Not at all. The orchestra will continue to play its usual fare in its regular venue, the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta. So why is Encore Park being built? As a cash cow. Don Fox, the ASO's chief financial officer, told Pierre Ruhe of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the amphitheater is "a revenue- generating exercise" pure and simple. Its profits will be used to subsidize the orchestra and help retire its $4.5 million debt.

I've been keeping an eye on Atlanta ever since its opera company decided to pull out of midtown and move its operations to a newly built suburban performing-arts center, the Cobb Energy Centre. By opting to acknowledge long-term demographic trends and follow its patrons to the suburbs, the Atlanta Opera helped to chart a course for what may well be the future of the arts in America. The Atlanta Symphony, by contrast, is acknowledging another, less encouraging aspect of that future, which is that fewer and fewer Americans seem to care for the fine arts. That's not true across the board -- opera is drawing bigger crowds than ever before -- but studies like the National Endowment for the Arts' recent "To Read or Not to Read" survey point to an overall decline in public interest in high culture.

This trend is not limited to the U.S. An Oxford University study last year concluded that England no longer contains a statistically significant group of "cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high-cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms." Two-thirds of all Britons consume little or no high culture at all, while most of the rest do so only occasionally. According to the study, similar research in other countries yields similar results.

That's why the ASO is opening Encore Park. If you can't make ends meet by selling tickets to classical concerts, why not sell tickets to rock concerts and use the proceeds to underwrite the classical end of your business? It makes sense on paper, and it's worked before. That's how the classical-recording business operated a half-century ago, when a label like Columbia would use part of the profits from its pop releases to cover the losses of its Masterworks classical division. The assumption was that great recordings of the classics by artists like Leonard Bernstein and Rudolf Serkin would sell enough copies over the long haul to pay for themselves -- and that's just what happened. But then the major record labels were swallowed up by multinational corporations and had to justify the low short-term profits of their classical releases to their investors. That's when crossover was born, followed shortly thereafter by the decimation of the classical recording industry.

Might the same thing happen to fine-arts institutions like the ASO that seek to pay for their highbrow activities by getting into the pop-culture business? The answer is that it's already happening. Regional symphony orchestras and theater companies are increasingly finding themselves squeezed off the stages of performing-arts centers by high-grossing Broadway road shows. A similar specter was discreetly raised by Dennis Gephardt, an analyst for Moody's Investors Services, when he told the Journal-Constitution that Encore Park's "earned- income orientation -- from tickets, parking and concessions -- is a challenge relative to the more stable donor-driven support that [the ASO is] used to, that most nonprofit arts groups are comfortable with."

I'm all for the "entrepreneurial spirit" that ASO president Allison Vulgamore says is represented by the Encore Park venture. In an age of pop culture, somebody has to pay the ticket for high culture, and this plan might just work. Yet I can't help but recall the different approach of Philippe de Montebello, the departing director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. As the Journal's Eric Gibson recently wrote, the de Montebello Met "has drawn in its public the old-fashioned way -- routinely offering it intellectually substantial fare." This approach has proved to be a tremendous success.

Might the Met's unswerving commitment to the permanent appeal of classic art serve as a model for other arts institutions? Or are the visual arts appealing in a way that symphony orchestras cannot hope to rival regardless of what they do? If so, then Atlantans probably won't be hearing Beethoven's Ninth very often in the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre -- and the day may come when they'll be hearing it less often in Atlanta Symphony Hall.

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Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at [email protected].