Is the Met Opera “Too Big to Fail”?

This week’s headlines about the Metropolitan Opera made me stop in my tracks. News broke that the Met Opera is exploring licensing its intellectual property and even the naming rights to its iconic building. Add to that its recently announced performances in Saudi Arabia — a country where human rights abuses are well documented — and you have to ask: what does survival look like when an institution is built on being “too big to fail”?

The Met Opera has always been about scale. Big operas, big stars, big productions. That identity made it the crown jewel of American opera — but it also locked the company into a business model that doesn’t easily bend when audiences and donor bases shift. Unlike some smaller performing arts organizations that can cut back, reinvent, or experiment their way through hard times, the Met’s brand is built on grandeur. Gelb tried to shift to prioritizing new operas to attract new audiences, but I think he may have over-interpreted the positive sales of premieres of new operas from the previous years. Shrinking down isn’t an option without eroding the very thing it stands for.

The problem is that the numbers no longer add up. According to the latest research from the National Endowment for the Arts Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, fewer than 1% of Americans attend an opera in a given year. Even the Met’s innovative simulcasts — once hoped to be a lifeline to reach new audiences and leverage the international fan base of opera— have seen attendance drop by half, as shared in the NYTimes article linked above. Federal and foundation funding has tightened, donors are thinning out, and ticket sales have never even come close to covering expenses (that’s the model). In that context, it’s easy to see how the Faustian bargains begin: lucrative offers from countries with troubling records, or monetizing the Met’s name like a sports arena.

Gelb’s quotes in the NYTimes show how he’s twisted himself into knots to rationalize the Saudi Arabia decision: how despite the fact that the country murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it’s OK that the Met Opera partners with the government because everyone else is doing it: “All the democratic governments that I know of are engaged in business with Saudi Arabia.” Even though the country offers hardly any rights to women, they’re “trying to improve”.

But he mostly hides behind his duties as the steward of the Met Opera. “I have to put the survival of the institution of the Met first…I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue.” He’s pretending this is a minor issue instead of a major, multi-million dollar partnership that contributes to propping up a repressive government by offering it legitimacy in the international cultural landscape. He’s abdicating all moral responsibility and claiming it’s OK because it will keep the organization running. What’s the point of having an organization if it has no moral integrity?

I can’t give Gelb any leeway here with this level of capitulation, but let’s pull out a lesson that applies across the arts sector. I know the weight of running an arts organization. There are people’s livelihoods, artists’ careers, donors’ trust, and audiences’ loyalty at stake. When I was inside that world, the pressures felt all-consuming. Every decision was about keeping the lights on for the next season, honoring commitments to staff, and meeting expectations of supporters. But since stepping into academia, I’ve been able to see the broader picture. Those urgent, internal pressures can obscure the larger cultural, economic and even ethical contexts.

And that’s where the Met’s story becomes a mirror for the rest of us. What does it mean for an arts organization to survive at all costs? If survival requires sacrificing the values and integrity that gave an institution its meaning, what exactly are we saving?

Too often, we cling to legacy models of scale, programming, and funding, hoping to ride out the storm. But the world around us has changed — audiences connect with culture in different ways, communities demand different kinds of relevance, and trust in institutions is fragile. Meeting this moment doesn’t mean chasing the biggest check or cutting deals that compromise our core values. It means letting go of outdated assumptions and building new, authentic connections with the audiences and communities we serve.

That doesn’t mean the choices are easy. They aren’t. I’ve been in those boardrooms, and I know the fear of disappointing loyal stakeholders. But leadership in the arts has to be about more than preservation. It has to be about imagination. If we continue to make decisions only through the lens of short-term survival, we may end up with organizations that look intact from the outside but are hollowed out within.

The Met Opera reminds us what’s at stake when institutions define themselves as too big to fail. Its current path should make all of us — especially those leading cultural organizations — pause and ask: are we protecting the past at the expense of the future? Are we willing to risk our integrity for survival, or can we find the courage to evolve in ways that keep faith with our mission and our communities?

Because in the long run, audiences won’t be moved by names on buildings or deals with regimes. They’ll be moved by whether we stayed true to the art, to the people we serve, and to the values we claim to hold.