New York City is the cultural capital of the state, and leads the nation in both the creative and the performing arts. The state's foremost arts center is Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in Manhattan. Facilities at Lincoln Center include Avery Fisher Hall (which opened as Philharmonic Hall in 1962), the home of the New York Philharmonic; the Metropolitan Opera House (1966), where the Metropolitan Opera Company performs; and the New York State Theater, which presents both the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet. Also at Lincoln Center are the Julliard School and the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts. The best-known arts center outside New York City is the Saratoga Performing Arts Center at Saratoga Springs. During the summer, the Saratoga Center presents performances by the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Artpark, a state park at Lewiston, has a 2,324-seat theater for operas and musicals, and offers art exhibits during the summer. Classical music, opera, and plays are performed at the Chautauqua Festival, which has been held every summer since 1874.
In 2003, the New York State Council on the Arts and other New York arts organizations received grants totaling over $15 million from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Council on the Arts also receives funding from the state as well as contributions from private sources. Audiences for the state's arts programs total well over 200 million, and there are more than 1.5 million contributing artists. The state offers arts education programs to about one million schoolchildren. The state of New York has approximately 2,000 arts associations and 90 local art groups. The New York State Council on the Arts contributed to the Arts Connection of New York City and to the National Book Foundation.
The New York Council for the Humanities was established in 1975. In 2000, the National Endowment for the Humanities contributed over $12 million to 140 state programs.
In addition to its many museums, New York City has more than 350 galleries devoted to the visual and plastic arts. The city's most famous artists' district is Greenwich Village, which still holds an annual outdoor art show, although after the 1950s many artists moved to SoHo (Manhattan on the West Side between Canal and Houston Streets), NoHo (immediately north of Houston Street), the East Village, and Tribeca (between Canal Street and the World Trade Center). By the early 1980s, artists seeking space at reasonable prices were moving to Long Island City in Queens, to areas of Brooklyn, or out of the city entirely, to places such as Hoboken and Paterson in New Jersey. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, abstract painters—including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning—helped make the city a center of the avant garde.
At the same time, poets such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery sought verbal analogues to developments in the visual arts, and an urbane, improvisatory literature was created. New York has enjoyed a vigorous poetic tradition throughout its history, most notably with the works of Walt Whitman (who served as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle from 1846 to 1848) and through Hart Crane's mythic vision of the city in his long poem The Bridge. The emergence of New York as the center of the US publishing and communications industries fostered the growth of a literary marketplace, attracting writers from across the country and the world. Early New York novelists included Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville; among the many who made their home in the city in the 20th century were Thomas Wolfe and Norman Mailer. The simultaneous growth of the Broadway stage made New York City a vital forum for playwriting, songwriting, and theatrical production.
There are more than 35 Broadway theaters—large theaters in midtown Manhattan presenting full-scale, sometimes lavish productions with top-rank performers. "Off Broadway" productions are often of high professional quality, though typically in smaller theaters, outside the midtown district, often with smaller casts and less costly settings. "Off-Off Broadway" productions range from small experimental theaters on the fringes of the city to performances in nightclubs and cabarets. The New York metropolitan area has hundreds of motion picture theaters—more than 65 in Manhattan alone, not counting special series at the Museum of Modern Art and other cultural institutions. In the 1970s, New York City made a determined and successful effort to attract motion picture production companies.
New York's leading symphony orchestra is the New York Philharmonic, whose history dates back to the founding of the Philharmonic Society of New York in 1842. Among the principal conductors of the orchestra have been Gustav Mahler, Josef Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Kurt Masur. Leading US and foreign orchestras and soloists appear at both Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall, built in 1892 and famed for its acoustics. In 2003 the New York Philharmonic announced that it would leave Lincoln Center and move back to Carnegie Hall sometime during or after 2005. Important orchestras outside New York City include the Buffalo Philharmonic, which performs at Kleinhans Music Hall, the Rochester Philharmonic, and the Eastman Philharmonia, the orchestra of the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester).
New York City is one of the world centers of ballet. Of special renown is the New York City Ballet, whose principal choreographer until his death in 1983 was George Balanchine. Many other ballet companies, including the American Ballet Theatre and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, make regular appearances in New York. Rochester, Syracuse, Cooperstown, Chautauqua, and Binghamton have opera companies, and Lake George has an opera festival. Jazz and popular artists perform at more than 60 nightspots in New York City. The Westbury Music Fair (Long Island) presents a wide-ranging annual program of musical entertainment, and resorts in the Catskills offer both music and comedy to their patrons. New York City is a major link in the US songwriting, music publishing, and recording industries.