Art & Creativity Quote by Bruce Beresford

Beresford’s line isn’t really about opera; it’s about permission. A film director praising an old, high-status art form in the language of metrics is a tell: he’s laundering “culture” through something modern audiences are trained to respect - scale, attendance, growth. Opera doesn’t need defending on aesthetic grounds here. It’s being reframed as a thriving industry, an event economy, a social habit. That’s the intent: to knock down the lazy assumption that opera is a museum piece for the wealthy and elderly by pointing to empirical signals of life.

The subtext is pragmatic and slightly defensive. If you’ve spent a career trying to get ambitious, expensive projects made, you learn that legitimacy often comes from numbers, not rapture. Saying “more popular than ever” is less a neutral observation than a strategic counter-narrative aimed at funders, policymakers, and cultural gatekeepers who treat opera as a subsidy sink. Opera becomes a proof point that “serious” art can still sell, which quietly argues for continued institutional support - and, by extension, support for the kinds of prestige storytelling Beresford himself traffics in.

Context matters: global opera has expanded through touring, festivalization, state-backed cultural branding, and the “destination” logic of new landmark venues. Attendance can reflect tourism and programming strategy as much as grassroots devotion. Beresford’s claim works because it’s optimistic without sounding naive: it borrows the cool authority of data to make a warm pitch for relevance.