Re:Cities should not pay for new stadiums
by atdrummond on Tuesday March 15, 2022 @01:07PM
(#30687884)
While I love opera and have supported it financially in multiple places I've resided, I find it laughable that any major urban electorate in the US would actually support the Opera fiscally if that decision was left to them directly.
Nothing in a democracy happens because the majority of constituents want it to happen. The majority of constituents don't know or care enough to explicitly agree with any particular novel-and-domain-specific policy.
Instead, things happen in a democracy because vocal minorities of constituents push for it, and nobody in the rest of the constituency cares enough to push in the opposite direction.
If a policy turns out to be disliked by the majority, the expectation is that the policy will rile up another vocal minority enough that they'll be inspired to come along and advocate to change things back in the other direction. If no vocal counter-minority ever forms, the policy stays.
To be clear, this isn't a corruption of the democratic process; rather, this is what it means to have a decision be made "democratically."
Re:Cities should not pay for new stadiums
by atdrummond on Tuesday March 15, 2022 @03:07PM
(#30689710)
I am well aware of this. I'm responding to the notion that support of institutions like the Kennedy Center has any correspondence to the desires of anything beyond an extreme minority of the population. You're lecturing the wrong person.
Most programs aren't supported by most people. However, the bundle of programs is. That's compromise.
West End theatre in London is developed by a complex amalgamation of arts organizations, grants, &c. and personally I find the scene more inventive and exciting than broadway, as a theater-goer.
This is unlike "musicals", which are protected by copyright, and are thus only run by the musical's rights-holder's licensed troupe(s), in a particular place (usually Broadway), with a particular interpretation of the material (the rights-holder's); where the revenues are due to high ticket prices that can be charged often only due to the artificially-created scarcity of performances of said musical due to IP law. (I.e. for many musical, nobody is going because they're fans of the particular actors/director/etc; they just wanted to see a performance of musical X, akin to what you'd get from seeing opera X. But there's only one available performance of a given musical X. Musical producers have a monopoly on performances of their musical.)
Musicals make money, by design. Opera does not make money, by design. Instead, opera houses take donations, in much the same way that you might imagine a "local open-source software development collective" might take donations.
When the people of a municipality get together and decide that they consider their local opera house a "local cultural institution" worth supporting with their tax money (usually only to prop it up in bad donation years), this does certainly make the opera house into a "government-backed" project. But in this case, the "government" here is just the mob-action of the people of the city. It's the atheist version of a church congregation agreeing that their tithes should be partly directed to some local needy cause.