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"Putting people to work is more important than putting more art on the wall of some New York City gallery frequented by the elite art community," said Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia during the debate.

Lynch calls that attitude "uninformed and perhaps disingenuous." His group estimates that non-profit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion each year in cultural and related spending such as restaurants and parking, and they produce $30 billion in tax revenue and 5.7 million jobs.

"Those jobs are every bit as important as an auto industry worker," Lynch says. He says 10,000 arts groups employing 260,000 artists and support workers could close this year.

One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human
communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross
Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by
campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by
campaigning old style, from the back of a train.

Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming
around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that
people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly
present on their territory.

The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and
raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the
letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined
the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show
business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it.
Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh.

Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while
ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise
what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock
of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the
market supplies them.

I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They
crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see
those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want,
they will pay for.

"Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.

For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.

"We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.

Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.

In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.

There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.

Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says

Why?

"The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.