Economics on Stage : the Economic Approach to the Performing Arts

The relationship between economics and the arts has been in the spotlight for many years now, but the argument has been mainly that there is one such relationship. The possibility of economics to treat the arts as a field of study was, for some time, controversial enough to be the centre of the academic discussion. Presently, after a body of literature has been written about the subject, it seems adequate to focus on what has been done and how that has helped gaining a better understanding of the workings of the arts as an economic activity.
The performing arts – and theatre in particular – are the main focus of this thesis. The way in which economics has been approaching this area was appraised by conducting a review of the literature on the economics of the performing arts and, in this context, analysing the research interests, the methods and the conclusions presented in this literature. It has become apparent in the course of this analysis that economists are replicating for the performing arts what they do for other industries in the economy. This means that few adaptations were made to the theories in order to accommodate specificities of the performing arts.
My reading of this observation is that it fits with the pursuit of an ideal of unification that economic science has been engaged in and that applies to different fields of study. So an exploration of how the performing arts have entered into the scope of economics is made; concretely, pieces of theory that frame the concept of the ideal of unification are applied to the economics of the performing arts to check whether this notion actually adheres to what economists have been doing. But the interest in this thesis lies, not only in the economics part of the economics of the performing arts, but also in the performing arts segment. The idea is that theatre is a social creation, but it does not mean that it is not real or that it is not inquirer-independent. When economists study the activity of making theatre, they are observers of a reality that is not conditioned by them. There are certain aspects of theatre that are what they are, and that cannot be subject to alterations in order to adjust to predefined theories or derivational patterns. So knowing what ontologically defines theatre, particularly in regard to fundamental economic concepts becomes crucial, and that is done by analysing the practitioners’ own account of their activity.
The social ontology of theatre bears consequences for economics. The failure in representing the performing arts as they are is a failure in representing the world, in describing it and, forcibly, in putting forth theories that are useful and close to the actual field.
The central proposition of this thesis is that economics has entered the world of the performing arts, but has not yet found a way to adjust to a reality that it does not command. The approach as, so far, been so as to make the performing arts fit certain economic patterns; but what could be more productive for both economics and the performing arts is to build economic theories to actually explain the idiosyncrasies of the field and not leave out those idiosyncrasies because they get in the way of applying pre-existing schemes.