One challenge that the humanities have traditionally faced in the United States is the perception that they are the purview of cultural elites, produced by and for a select few. This has been the case particularly for the fine arts, yet accurate measures of public opinion are extremely scarce. The only reliable data comes from the GSS. The GSS data are limited, however, because the topic of the fine arts has appeared only twice in recent years, in 1993 and 1998, and the items about art and popular culture amounted to only three. Making meaningful generalizations about American attitudes toward the arts during those years on the basis of such limited data is difficult, and saying anything about current attitudes is impossible. However, the results of the survey do indicate that in the 1990s a shift occurred in the degree to which Americans felt that the fine arts were accessible. The decade also saw an increasing appreciation for the artistic merits of popular culture.

In 1993, over 49% of Americans either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Only a few people have the knowledge and ability to judge excellence in the arts” (Figure V-16a). By 1998, however, a significant shift had occurred toward the view that more than just a handful of people have the competence to assess the quality of artistic production. While there was a small increase in the number of people strongly agreeing with the statement above, the percentage of respondents expressing basic agreement had dropped by almost 10 points at the same time that the percentage of those who strongly disagreed had risen from 9.4% to 16.7%.

Figure V-16a, Full Size Supporting Data

Further evidence of the fact that the American public was coming to feel less alienated from “high culture” in the 1990s was the decrease in the proportion of Americans expressing derisive opinions toward contemporary art. Between 1993 and 1998, the level of agreement with the statement, “Modern painting is just slapped on: a child could do it,” declined by approximately 10 percentage points (Figure V-16b). Earlier in the decade, Americans demonstrated that they did not feel that the traditional fine arts were the sole repository of beauty and meaning, with 95% of adults asserting in 1993 that artistic excellence could also be found in popular and folk culture (Figure V-16c).