Cultural subsidies
Precisely because culture should be a common good, it is paramount to keep theaters and museums' costs low and cut unnecessary expenses.
2025-05-26 by Luca Dellanna
The city of Geneva subsidizes opera single-ticket purchases at the rate of about $541 per ticket.1
This phenomenon, in which most opera theater revenue comes from subsidies instead of the audience, is quite common in Europe. In my hometown of Turin, Italy, public subsidies are $163 per ticket sold, and public subsidies represent 58% of revenue (tickets are 17%, and the rest is mostly private subsidies).2 In Paris, public subsidies represent 57% of the revenue of the Bastille Opera.3
Despite all these subsidies, attendance remains low. For example, last year, Turin’s opera theater only filled 74% of the places available – and that in spite of subsidies lowering the average ticket price from 204€ down to 41€ (an 80% discount).
The problem is not a lack of subsidies but an excess of costs. If my local opera theater managed to cut costs by 10%, tickets could be 20€ (assuming constant subsidies). If we believe that dropping the ticket prices from 40€ a piece to 20€ a piece would help fill that 26% of empty seats, a reasonable guess by all means, the breakeven ticket price could be further dropped to 16€. And if my local opera managed to cut costs by 20%, tickets could be free. That would be fantastic!
There is a common argument that culture is a common good, just like education and healthcare, and therefore should be subsidized. I agree with it! But precisely because culture should be a common good, it is paramount to keep its costs low and cut unnecessary expenses.
Too often, we see culture subsidies as a false dichotomy, where either we give enough money to theaters and museums to cover all their costs, or they will close. However, this neglects that while some costs are necessary (some employees, utilities, etc.), others are unnecessary (other employees, some frivolities, etc), and it is paramount to ensure the former are funded while the latter are defunded. It is also critical to ensure that the theater and museums are well-managed and run efficiently. The idea that culture should be a basic good is incompatible with theaters and museums being badly managed and paying unnecessary wages.
This is particularly relevant since public subsidies are a finite quantity. The more we fund unnecessary expenses in one theater, the fewer theaters we can fund. (And the more we fund unnecessary expenses in theaters, the fewer schools and hospitals we can fund.) It is precisely because culture is important that we should care about how efficiently subsidies are used.
Hence, we shall review the income statements and operating expenses of all recipients of public subsidies carefully and make these subsidies conditional on the recipient removing unnecessary costs.
Unless we do that, we will get less culture despite spending more on it.
