I don’t know exactly when anthropologists & sociologists decided upon the phrase ‘cultural omnivore.’ I only know that I hadn’t heard of such a thing until I read an article about it a little over two months ago.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) suggested in their report on attendance at cultural activities that it is not perhaps that the creature known as the cultural omnivore is dying, but that their preferred medium is changing. In other words, they interact with the arts through television and the internet.
This is not actually reassuring.
Ballet and live theatre cannot be maintained exclusively through YouTube clips nor opera exclusively through broadcasts of the Met onto movie screens.
A separate NEA report concluded that half of all attendees at arts events (live performances of classical music, art openings, etc.) come from two groups that the author classifies as ‘high brow’ and the aforementioned ‘cultural omnivores.’
Omnivores dropped by a third – from 15% to 10% of the population – between 1982 and 2008 and high brows dropped from 7% to 5% over the same period.
What is to become of our culture? I have been attending the opera at least once a year for a decade and have gone at least three times a year since 2006. I regularly attend performances of classical music and even dated a violinist for a while when I lived in Los Angeles. And that’s not even to speak how this might impact my great love, poetry!
the coffee philosopher 
Not having an opera house in my city, I still go to Montreal to see one every year. I read sprawling novels and make dubious amounts of annotations with stickies, so I don’t read many books but I read long, quality pieces of literature. I am only legal in half the provinces yet smoke cigars when possible. I appreciate foreign films, attend theatre a lot annually, know three languages, attend art exhibitions, use my turntable for oldies and some new hip hop records, enjoy fashion, pen my letters, write, read, and attend nights of poetry, read the morning paper, read my magazine subscriptions, among other artistic cultural activities… I hope you have noticed as much as I have the infrequency of bumping into an acquaintance at one venue from the previous.
I guess that’s the problem – people who attend poetry slams, but don’t read poetry books or mags. People who listen to NPR in the car, but never attend a performance by their local philharmonic. Etc. Etc. Etc.