Or severely deflate. The instruments and people and equipment will still be there, just much much cheaper to get. Companies will be owned by defaulted bonds rather than stocks.
I like Ben Folds's perspective on the institution of the symphony orchestra as a celebration of civilization itself. The performing arts are all about groups of people coming together to pull off something greater than the sum of its parts.
But the unfortunate corollary is that you cannot just stack up the parts and have a successful production by magic. It takes a lot more than that. The institutions and structures currently doing it season after season have a kind of life of their own, and it's absolutely subject to decay and death. The ecological niche they occupy is extraordinarily harsh, so they're not easily replaced either.
Practically speaking: you need space and equipment. You need artistic direction with taste and vision to hire the right performers and designers and communicate it to them. You need skilled craftsmen to implement the designs, quick-thinking managers to wrangle the logistics, ambitious 2nd assistants to make the coffee. You'll need all this for months before you turn a dollar of revenue. Then you need marketers to bring in an audience, front of house staff to deal with it, professional schmoozers to pry open the rich ones' checkbooks (ticket sales are never enough).
If it turns out the creative vision was too safe, it'll be panned as boring and derivative. If you take a risk and fail, you'll also get eaten alive. So you have to take a real risk, and have it go your way, every time. At any point, one of the key people who held it all together by the seat of her pants could retire to take care of her sick mother. Or a crucial benefactor (public or private) could have a change of heart. Or Walgreens could snatch up the lease on your performance space. Or an influential critic could be in a bad mood. Any one of these things could be the end.
Please do not take performing arts organizations for granted. There are many once-grand theaters and concert halls in this country abandoned and rotting away. Even more that were simply erased. These things hang on to life by a thread in the best of times.
