Singapore has world-class arts infrastructure — the $600M Esplanade, the National Gallery, three Renaissance City Plans, the new University of the Arts Singapore. But has it built audiences for it? The chapter uses the SG Culture Pass (September 2025) as its entry point: a state intervention that treats price as the obstacle when NAC's own surveys identify time, companionship, and unfamiliarity as the real barriers.
From there, it examines career economics, the state-as-patron tension (using two canonical Singapore cases), and the structural role of the education pipeline. The strongest essay position holds two truths simultaneously: the infrastructure is a genuine achievement, and the gap between infrastructure and appreciation is also genuine — and it is the gap, not either pole alone, that defines the question.