Should the arts act more like airlines?

The U.S. airline industry — essentially an oligarchy — has come to love the word “discipline.” Abandoning its past practice of adding competitive routes and bigger planes on a whim, the likes of American and United now have figured out that in order to be profitable they must limit capacity. Better to charge more per seat than risk a half-empty plane.

Which is why you’ll be paying through the nose if you want to go to Florida the week after Christmas.

That’s exactly what the Lyric Opera of Chicago has been trying to do. Faced with falling demand for opera in Chicago (more about why in a minute), it has made some drastic changes. It hasn’t changed the number of operas produced in a season, which would involve the kind of systemic change that would upset its loyal subscribers and threaten its status as a world-class company, but it has reduced the number of performances of each opera. Instead of doing around 85 to 90 operatic performances a year as it did just a decade ago, the Lyric now stages just 55.

Economists would call that smart capacity control: Better to have 55 heavily attended performances than to play to half a house for 90. This is especially true since ticket buyers don’t pay the full costs of the opera; every performance requires subsidy by contributors. And while it’s great to stretch out on a half-empty 737, half a house at the Lyric actually spoils the communal experience. The Lyric’s approach has been a