What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s fashion. The most read novel of 2012 is Fifty Shades of Grey. But nobody would regard that as an exemplar of the novelist’s art, or think of it as trendy in any way. The link between popularity — or ubiquity — and importance is a complicated one. Here, in an ingenuous way, is an object for a case study.
Opera is not ‘popular’ in any sense at all. Almost nobody is interested in it, apart from you and me. If it’s next to impossible to get tickets for any performance of significance, and if in recent years the broadcasting of live performances to cinemas worldwide has increased the audience exponentially, those audiences are still minuscule in number compared to other art forms.
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