By Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan
Timothée Chalamet recently kicked up a small cultural controversy by saying that nobody really cares about opera and ballet anymore. The comment was framed as a kind of observation about markets and audiences – things change, tastes evolve, and some art forms simply aren’t as central as they once were.
A lot of people in opera and ballet understandably pushed back. Others defended him. And we suspect that if you asked many people what an economist would think about this, the answer would be pretty predictable: the economist would side with Chalamet. If demand isn’t there, then the market has spoken.
We get why people might think that. We’ve actually written here quite a bit arguing that the cultural sector doesn’t always take demand seriously enough. Arts organizations sometimes talk as if audiences should simply show up out of cultural duty, and that’s not how markets – or people – work. Demand matters a lot. If people aren’t interested, you cannot just wish them into the seats.
As economists, then, we’re sympathetic to the instinct behind what Chalamet said.
But it’s still not quite the whole story.
One of the useful things about cultural economics is that it gives us a vocabulary for thinking about the value of cultural institutions beyond the people who actually buy tickets. Back in 1989, Bruno Frey and Werner Pommerehne wrote about several kinds of benefits that cultural goods generate for society that don’t necessarily show up in ticket sales.
Take existence value. People often care that certain things exist even if they never personally consume them. You may never go to the opera, but you might still feel that something important would be lost if opera vanished from the cultural landscape. It’s the same reason people support preserving historic buildings they never enter or national parks they never visit. This is real value, with real data backing it up. (Check it out here!)
Then there’s option value, which is basically the value of keeping the possibility open. You may not want to go to the opera today, but you might like knowing that you could someday. Tastes change over time – sometimes dramatically. People encounter things later in life they never expected to care about. The fact that these institutions exist keeps that option alive.
And there’s bequest value, which is the sense that some things are worth preserving for the next generation regardless of how much we ourselves use them. Cultural traditions often function this way. They’re not only products for today’s consumers; they’re also part of a long chain of cultural inheritance.
And this is the part worth underscoring: these are not anti-demand arguments. They are still demand-side claims. They are still about what the public values. They just refer to forms of value that current ticket sales do not fully capture.
Once you start thinking in those terms, the picture becomes a little more complicated than “people aren’t buying enough tickets.” Ticket demand tells us something important – but it doesn’t capture every benefit people get from the arts.
There’s also something mildly funny about the context for this controversy. As Saturday Night Live‘s “Weekend Update” segment joked, Chalamet made his comment while on a press tour for a movie about ping pong. Which, we sincerely hope, is wonderful. But if we’re ranking cultural products purely by the number of people immediately interested in their subject matter, it’s not obvious that a prestige film about table tennis has a huge advantage over Swan Lake. (Besides, theatrical admissions are down about 36% since 2019. Better than the 52% decline for ballet since 1982? Chalamet as a next-gen savior of cinematic arts might do better to bolster his domain rather than pointing to other domains’ faster declines. )
None of this means demand doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But the value of art isn’t always perfectly captured by the box office. And of course capturing those values is hard to do, as The Met’s recent struggles remind us.
Anyway, we’ve now spent far too long thinking about this debate. One of us is going to go play ping pong. The other is putting on Carmen. Your guess who is going to do what.