Culture in crisis: Deploying metaphor in defense of art

•Evaluates how arts advocates use metaphor to defend arts organizations under threat.•Compares organizations across high/popular culture and nonprofit/commercial axes.•Measures metaphors in two ways, one inductive, one deductive.•Finds that high culture nonprofits arts return to elite metaphors not egalitarian.•Suggests that using elite metaphors in the short-term undermines legitimacy.

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.