By Johanna K. Taylor, Associate Professor, The Design School, Arizona State University

In choosing how we participate in the arts, we collectively shape how the arts are presented and accessed across the United States.

The influence of arts participants as entrepreneurs grew apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of the traditional forms of arts participation—from visiting a museum to attending a concert in a theater—were compromised. As we all strived toward a “new normal” during and after the pandemic, we experimented with broader forms of arts participation. We danced at remote parties hosted by DJs or featuring bands that brought people together through the shared, dispersed spaces of social media streaming. We visited virtual galleries honoring local visual artists and purchased artwork and provided financial support to our arts community. We spent time in parks and outdoor spaces, inviting neighbors to join us in informal street parades.

As an arts professor in Phoenix, Arizona, my own participation habits shifted. I went to concerts hosted by a local couple who launched a popular music series in their front lawn, showcasing a variety of bands and encouraging virtual donations to the musicians. Attendees would bring drinks and snacks to share, making it a community celebration. One of my graduate students developed a capstone project highlighting local queer performing artists. The event was intended for a popular counterculture venue but shifted to an online livestream. The project deeply resonated with audiences and participants, and received city funding so it could continue. As an arts participant, I felt the necessity of people coming together to experience the arts in their communities. As arts participants, we had a collective voice, one that declared our need to access the arts in ways that accommodated our rapidly changing lives.

The 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) (1) captures arts participation among adults in the U.S. at a period of flux in the course of the pandemic. Because the survey is a snapshot of a specific moment in time, it does not show the evolution of the changing nature of arts participation during the pandemic, but it does report how people were choosing to engage in the arts amid a dramatic state of uncertainty as they began to define a new normal. In 2022, the SPPA in addition to the General Social Survey (GSS) (2) invited a nationally representative sample of adults to reflect on choices they made while experimenting with and constructing their future arts-participation preferences.

The resulting snapshot portrays how respondents were actively building more expansive forms of arts participation from 2021 to 2022. This rebuilding is captured in the ways in which people chose to engage with the arts—evident not so much for rates of participation in standard categories (these percentages largely decreased) but in growing engagement with “other” forms of art. Using the data in the survey for reference, this essay explores the “other forms” of arts participation as an active process of arts entrepreneurship and worldmaking. Such participation is a dynamic that must be created by the people, for the people.

Worldmaking and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The world is not static, but constantly changing; indeed, there is always the potential for a variety of future worlds to spring from the ideas and actions of today. (3) The arts are central to this notion of worldmaking. They invite us to consider new realities and test many possible futures through how we choose to participate, experience, create, and perform. 

Arts thought-leader Diane Ragsdale proposed worldmaking as a core concept that advances the field of arts entrepreneurship. The concept provides a useful lens for analyzing arts participation tabulated in the 2022 SPPA. Drawing from the work of leading entrepreneurship scholar Saras Sarasvathy, a scholar who makes worldmaking a core entrepreneurial method, Ragsdale incisively demonstrated that worldmaking is the call to action in “times of uncertainty—when prediction is not possible,” and can leverage “what is within one’s control (however modest) and learning (i.e., gaining insights and capacity for prediction).” (4)

The 2020 pandemic and its repercussions undermined our predictive models as a sector, yet people were rapidly assembling new worlds to meet the unpredictable contexts evolving around them. Arts participation was a part of this public response to uncertainty. People participated in ways that felt relevant, whether attending digital events that arts organizations had produced or creating new forms of art, culture, design, and performance. Through arts participation, people were actively inhabiting and building worlds that supported their need to transcend the conditions of COVID-19.

During the pandemic, every adult in the U.S. who was creating, performing, or attending art was able to escape, even temporarily, into a different world. While the proportion of adults who attended at least one arts event decreased by 11 percent from 2017 to 2022, more people created or performed art (52 percent) than went to see or experience some art form. The majority of adult respondents were involved in some form of arts production, suggesting that these art worlds are a meaningful part of life in the U.S.

In proposing “ways of worldmaking,” philosopher Nelson Goodman acknowledges that different individualistic pathways can conflict with each other while simultaneously co-existing, and that there are no established mutual contexts for the various worlds that people create. (5) Sarasthvy says that worldmaking invites us to “grapple with plurality, contingency, and possibility of the worlds that could be, the worlds we can make as well as the world we find ourselves in.” (6)

The plurality and simultaneity of the “worlds” of arts participation in which adults were engaged can be seen in the 2022 SPPA data. For instance, the survey captured public dedication to libraries—the first time this topic was included in the SPPA. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they had visited a library in 2022 as part of their arts and cultural lifestyle. The survey also asked about volunteering—including volunteering in the arts—which could open the door for further inquiries into arts participation at the intersection of civic and cultural engagement.

Ragsdale suggested that the “arts hold the potential to point to injurious worlds and (ways) to remake them.” (7) We can imagine that respondents to the 2022 survey who participated in the arts were looking for new opportunities to understand what was happening in the world around them and to construct new world paradigms.

The need for new opportunities was particularly evident in the increased turn to digital arts participation across arts forms, documented in both the SPPA and the GSS in 2022. The GSS survey results indicated that 82 percent of adult respondents engaged in some form of digital arts between 2021 and 2022. This finding suggests that digitally accessible art forms were a worldmaking outlet and opportunity during the pandemic for most of those surveyed. Accessible and widely promoted digital platforms supported equitable opportunities for arts participation, regardless of participants’ geographic location or economic status.

Beyond digital spaces, although people were stuck at home, many seemed to refrain from participating in some arts experiences that did not require visiting a venue. There were continued declines in fiction-reading, and fewer than half of all adults read at least one book (either in print or electronically)—a four-percentage-point decrease from the pre-pandemic rate of 2017. Yet the percentage of adults participating in a book club or reading group remained the same (five percent), suggesting that respondents continued to find benefits in existing community connections.

Arts participation is an entrepreneurial process of choosing how to spend time with the arts. Particularly as arts industries were facing severe funding cuts and dramatic decreases in attendance during the pandemic, the choices people made in arts participation became a political process of supporting preferred arts industries with a hope for their future existence. These choices involved worldmaking new realities and possible futures of arts participation advancing individual creativity, bringing people together in community experiences, and reflecting the public’s continually evolving arts passions.

Unpacking “Other Forms” and Evolving Methodologies

Each iteration of the SPPA captures in detail how people choose to participate in the arts, from going to see a visual art exhibition in a museum to attending a play in a theater or an outdoor concert in a park. Each survey also reflects how respondents themselves either create or perform in the arts. With each wave of the survey, questions have changed to reflect a federal understanding of the arts at that time, and to capture shifting societal choices. In anticipation of the next SPPA, respondents were asked if there are “other forms” of arts participation that they engaged in but which were not reflected in their responses.

Looking at performing arts specifically, participation decreased overall in the broad range of forms that are included in the survey—from dance to theater to jazz music in both traditional and nontraditional spaces. In recognition of the truth that the arts are always evolving, respondents were asked if they participated in performing art forms not explicitly discussed. Among these forms, the questionnaire suggested “rock, folk, or country music concerts; rap or hip-hop performances; comedy/improv, magic shows, or circus acts” as possible examples (p. 6). Twenty-one percent of adults said they did participate in these other forms—a significant increase of 41 percent from 2017 to 2022, suggesting that the activities in which they were engaging were not captured in the survey’s established categories.

Some of these “other forms” are reflected in responses to the broad questions about arts venues. For example, as arts audiences choose how and where to participate, outdoor spaces become sites in which to create their own arts experiences. The data show that touring “parks, buildings, or neighborhoods for historic or design value” decreased less than did participation in other categories—from 28 percent of all adults in 2017 to 26 percent in 2022. While the 2022 rate is lower than before the pandemic, it exhibits continued interest in an area that allows for personal ambition to seek out a cultural experience in a public place and is not dependent on an organization to establish operating hours and regulations.

The unrealized potential of the 2022 SPPA lies in the “other forms” of the arts that people were experiencing and creating in their daily lives. Layered within these “other forms” are the arts, cultural, and design experiences that matter to people. Participants were invited to self-define their chosen activities as artistic, to include them in this national survey. The notable increase in “other forms” of arts is an invitation to reflect on the innovative pathways of arts participation that were tested at the time and to define those arts experiences more formally as a part of the recognized arts lexicon captured in future surveys of arts participation.

Future Worlds of Arts Participation

People’s arts participation, as they self-define it, is constantly changing. Through our arts participation strategies, we all become entrepreneurs—conceptualizing new worlds of artistic possibility, defined by the people and for the people. While each SPPA reflects a complex spectrum of arts participation, the 2022 report focuses on a hyper-specific pandemic moment. It is important to remember the lessons of the period to inform how to shape arts participation opportunities for future audiences.

During the pandemic, people applied the speculative approaches of worldmaking to create new shared realities and new processes for arts participation. This result is evident in the increase in digital arts participation and in the depths of artistic experiences hidden in the “other forms” displayed in the survey. Many other reports already have captured the lessons learned from digital arts programming amid the pandemic. The 2022 SPPA report is a reminder to reflect on what was tested and learned as new arts worlds are created. 

As for arts organizations—they, too, are changing, but in direct response to our expanding preferences as arts participants. For example, some art galleries are choosing to stop operating a physical location, especially those in cities without a culture of spending an afternoon walking between closely located galleries. These organizations find that between traveling to art fairs and connecting with prospective collectors online, they no longer need the hefty overhead cost of rent. Plus, a remote operation allows these groups to more proactively support emerging artists. (8)

The concept of worldmaking can “contribute greatly to an understanding of how to collectively imagine/make new ways of relating to ourselves, each other, our built and natural worlds, history, the present, and the future.” (9) Readers of the SPPA report can realize their potential as arts entrepreneurs in choosing how they want to participate in the arts. Together we are uniting people in new ways through arts participation.

1. National Endowment for the Arts (2023). Arts Participation Patterns in 2022: Highlights from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2022-SPPA-final.pdf.
2. National Endowment for the Arts (2023). Online Audience for Arts Programing: A Survey of Virtual Participation Amid COVID-19. National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/GSS-Brief-Dec2023-Revision.pdf.
3. Nünning, V., Nünning, Ansgar., & Neumann, Birgit. (2010). Cultural ways of worldmaking media and narratives. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110227567 
4. Ragsdale, D. et. al. (2023). Futurecasting Glossary. In A. Callander and J.K. Taylor (Eds.), The Expanded Field of Arts Entrepreneurship [Special Issue]. Artivate. 11(3), 4-6. 
5. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Hackett Pub. Co.
6. Sarasvathy, S. (2012). Worldmaking. In A. Corbett and J.A. Katz (Eds.), Entrepreneurial Action (Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, Vol. 14, pp. 1-24) Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 
7. Ragsdale, 2023, p. 5 
8. Rabb, M. 2023. Galleries are Still Adopting to the New Normal, Post-COVID. Artsy. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-galleries-adapting-new-normal-post-covid 
9. Ragsdale, 2023, p. 6