An accounting-based survey of the performing arts sector

Management of arts and cultural organizations has recently gained importance especially in those countries with a rich cultural heritage. This is even truer in the performing arts sector where poor public funding for institutions has imposed severe budget constraints and pushed them to seek financial interventions of foundations, private investors and commercial sponsors. Recent studies have focused on the privatization trend involving cultural organizations and several others to their performance measurement, but none of them has addressed the significant trends of Opera Houses performance after their privatization. The main contribution of the paper consists of a survey of Italian Opera Houses after their transformation into foundations of private law. Applying a parsimonious number of pre-theorized financial performance indicators, the study suggests on the one hand that privatization has lead, with a few exceptions, to a general increase in overall contribution for Opera Houses and, on the other hand, to a better self-financing attitude towards employees salaries. Issues related to demand-side and back-office effectiveness are argued as well.