Culture in crisis: Deploying metaphor in defense of art

This paper examines the public discourse around cultural organizations under threat of closing. When discussing these crises, do people cling to old metaphors or find new ways to defend the arts? We compare the use of metaphor across the field of cultural organizations from high to popular culture and nonprofit to commercial. These questions are timely, with U.S. cultural policy under strain and rising rates of closure facing orchestras and theaters. Rather than forging a new path, we ultimately find that discourse around high culture nonprofits relies on old, elitist metaphors.