At the inception of its initial fundraising campaign, President Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as the "great cultural adventure" that would transform twelve deteriorated acres on the west side of New York City's Manhattan into a magnificent complex of auditoriums. Instead, following its groundbreaking in 1959 Lincoln Center served as an unofficial referendum on how the new rich, as well as the masses, perceived the performing arts at the height of America's Imperial Age.

In the mid-1960s the media announced that a "cultural explosion" was at hand. Fortune's futurist, Alvin Toffler, argued that "millions of Americans have been attracted to the arts, changing the composition of the audience profoundly." Judging by consumer activity, he was right. At the end of the 1950s Americans spent $425 million annually on phonograph records pressed by...