Those of us of a certain generation will be familiar with this refrain (and may have repeated it ourselves so often that it feels like a truism): Utah supports the performing arts much more than it does the visual arts.

There are historical reasons for that belief: Unlike many religious leaders of his time, Brigham Young liked to dance, and so the Mormons did; they also liked a good story, so they built the Salt Lake Theatre (in 1862); the Salt Lake Tabernacle, with its 700-pipe organ, was completed a few years later, decades before the Salt Lake Temple. So, long before there was ever an art museum in the state of Utah, there were performance spaces—places where a community could gather and enjoy a spectacle.

Our history, however, is not so simple. Also in the 19th century, the LDS Church sent “art missionaries” to study in Paris, and the state of Utah created the first arts council in the country—early signals that public support for culture here wasn’t limited to the stage.

What a lot of us were really talking about, though, was press coverage. Back when the local newspapers still covered the arts in a meaningful way, many of us in the visual arts community felt like we were being ignored. Opera got ink. Ballet got ink. The Symphony got ink. The visual arts got graphite.

15 Bytes was founded on that perception. We didn’t just complain about it—we built an organization around it. But now, may years since, we realized something: we’ve never actually crunched the numbers.

So, a couple of decades after the fact, we decided to investigate.

Because we didn’t have the time or resources to be exhaustive (we leave that to a future MA student in Art History, hoping the program will continue to exist), we opted for a snapshot approach in our research. We had access to its archives, so we chose The Salt Lake Tribune, and focused on September 1998. September because it marks the traditional beginning of the arts season. And 1998 because it was the year 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter built his first (clunky) art website—the internet, in other words, was still young; it hadn’t yet begun to exert its full gravitational pull on newspapers, ad revenue, and attention itself.

The results confirmed our hypothesis.

Music: 14 articles • 5,947 words

Theater: 6 articles • 4,995 words

Dance: 4 articles • 3,096 words

Architecture: 5 articles • 3,593 words

Books/Literature: 13 articles • 6,738 words

Film: 2 articles • 1,390 words

Visual Arts: 4 articles • 1,313 words

48 articles • 27,072 words*

In September 1998, across four consecutive Sunday arts sections, the Trib ran 48 editorial arts articles (excluding calendar-style listings), totaling roughly 27,000 words. Dance, theater, and music alone accounted for 24 of those articles, while visual arts accounted for just four (with a word count that was less than 5% of the total arts coverage). The performing arts weren’t just better represented: they were the organizing spine of the section.

But then we remembered something important: 1998 is when Frank McEntire stopped writing for the Tribune. In other words, the paper no longer had a dedicated visual-arts beat writer in the way it had earlier in the decade. That kind of staffing can change the math. So, we looked back a couple of years.

Visual arts coverage in The Salt Lake Tribune did noticeably better in September 1996. In the four Sunday arts sections we sampled, the Tribune ran 48 editorial arts articles totaling about 32,000 words. This time visual arts accounted for three substantial features, totaling about 3,500 words, for more than 11% of the total coverage.

Music: 10 articles • 8,599 words

Theater: 3 articles • 3,340 words

Dance: 3 articles • 1,850 words

Visual Arts: 4 articles • 3,795 words

Architecture: 6 articles • 4,841 words

Books / Literature: 12 articles • 8,908 words

Film /TV: 2 articles • 1,384 words

40 articles • 32,717 words

If you lump all performing arts together, they still take the lion’s share—no question. But if you treat dance, theater, and music as separate categories (instead of one big “performing arts” bucket), visual arts holds its own surprisingly well against dance and theater in 1996. The category it can’t compete with is music—but then, “music” in a newspaper arts section includes everything from the Utah Symphony to pop records, touring acts, and national CD review columns. Its counterweight at the time was books and literature.

So yes: in a sense the refrain has some truth in it. But it depends on how you do the math. And when you look.

In retrospect, one of the most striking things about the Tribune’s Sunday arts pages in the late 1990s is how much they functioned as a single cultural bundle—a weekly package that tried to hold together a community’s cultural life. It balanced what was happening locally with what was happening nationally. Utah institutions were the core of the section—Ballet West, the Symphony, the Opera, local theaters—but alongside that were national book reviews, pop-music criticism, and features that had little to do with Salt Lake City except that they were offered up as part of what an educated Sunday reader might want to know.

That balance reminds us what a newspaper was doing back then, and how much harder it is to do now: it served as a kind of shared cultural orientation device. You could be a reader who didn’t go to the ballet, didn’t read contemporary fiction, didn’t follow architecture—and you still might absorb it simply because it was there, in your hands, on a Sunday morning, as part of what the city was. The section didn’t assume you were already an arts insider. It assumed you were a general reader, and it tried to bring the arts to you.

It also reminds us how much coverage depended on something simple and unglamorous, which continues and is maybe even amplified in the micro-publications of our own day: beats. When there were writers assigned to specific areas, the coverage wasn’t just more frequent—it was more confident. That there was even an architecture section was due in large part to the amazing Jack Goodman, who combined history, architectural analysis and civic commentary into a weekly column. Never again in Utah’s mass media would the built environment be treated as a real subject of cultural reporting, not just lifestyle filler or real estate boosterism. Phillips Gallery has named its downstairs gallery after George Dibble, and rightly so. That we have a strong sense of a visual arts community is due in large part to his writing—for decades—in the Salt Lake Tribune. After his death, Ann Poore and then Frank McEntire took up his mantle. In their absence, the visual arts coverage suffered.

But let’s not let our glasses get too rosy. The Sunday arts page wasn’t some utopian golden age of arts journalism. It was still a newspaper, and newspapers serve a particular audience—one that, if we’re being frank about the arts sections, could be a little elitist, or at least culturally prescriptive. There can be a kind of “here’s what you should care about” posture baked into the format (and even we digital offspring can be that way). It also functioned, to some extent, as consumer guidance: what to see, what to read, what to buy, what’s worth your weekend. That’s not a criticism so much as a recognition that this has always been part of the job of arts coverage in a general-interest outlet. Newspapers were never specialty journals. They were trying to help a broad public make choices.

And of course there’s the money question. Performing arts organizations were not only culturally prominent—they were also reliable advertisers. The symphony, opera, touring Broadway shows, major venues: these are institutions that bought ads, sold subscriptions, and had marketing budgets. They needed to sell tickets. (Galleries, by contrast, let people walk in for free.) It’s not shocking they received the most consistent attention. In a newspaper economy, that’s not favoritism or corruption—it’s gravity. Bills need to be paid.

By the look of things in our major media outlets today, when our culture’s dominant currency is attention, the arts don’t seem to pay the bills. The visual arts and performing arts no longer fight over their slice of the pie. They lament the lack of a pie.

Which, in hindsight, leads to the uncomfortable supposition: maybe the fine arts never really belonged in a daily paper in the first place? Maybe the arts section never sold papers the way the sports section did? Maybe the digital era has simply made plain what editors might have suspected all along but could never prove? Maybe we just got lucky for all those years when poetry and music and dance and paint were brought to the attention of the general public in a stack of wood pulp that arrived on your doorstep and could be left on your coffee table for all to read.

What we can know for sure is something has been lost in the shift from centralized coverage to niche coverage. Today, micro-audiences can be served by micro-publications—like ours—and in many ways that’s a beautiful thing. It allows for expertise, for depth, for attention to the kinds of work that don’t fit the mainstream mold. But it also means the arts are no longer woven into a common public story. A new generation isn’t stumbling across a museum review in the Sunday paper on their way to the comics, or accidentally learning that ballet auditions are happening, or reading about a book they’d never pick up, simply because the newspaper was put it in front of them.

(*This article is not a fundraising plea, but as we went through the numbers we couldn’t help but consider this: in September 1998, the Tribune’s coverage of all the arts in Utah came to approximately 27,000 words. We devoted nearly that many in the month of September 2025 to the visual arts alone.)

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.