Architetto Polemico

Mamdani’s scheme to give away “free” tickets to the opera, obviously in a crude effort to flatten class differences and because opera is viewed as something white-coded, something very much non-black and non-Indian, actually just shines a light on how non-elitist such institutions are. Among philistines on the left (of which Mamdani is one—the history of silver-spoon Indian rappers is a slim volume), there’s an assumption that “the opera” or “classical music” must be so prohibitively expensive that there are millions of impoverished black and Hispanic New Yorkers longing to walk the hallowed halls of the Met and perhaps hear Wagner’s Ring Cycle, far from the crushing banality of life in the bodega. But the truth is that a ticket to the Met costs just $25, while the cheapest tickets to see Beyoncé cost three times as much. If they had any genuine interest in opera before this stunt they might have known how affordable it is.