If I had a sensitivity to smells I think I'd probably avoid shows known for people masturbating on stage

If you're allergic or have sensitivity to smells, don't go to the experimental explosive fuck theater.

If you're sensitive enough to incense on stage or in theater that it critically physically disrupts your body, it must be difficult for you to even walk down the street alongside traffic fumes.

That's too bad, and it means you don't get to do literally everything; you are too sensitive for some things like extreme art pieces or hindu religious festivals.

You're sensitive and have limitations. you can't fight fires, and if you are truly critically physiologically sensitive to incense, must carry that responsibility around with you rather than expecting every person who uses incense to issue a public trigger warning.

We should not start ear-tagging domestic pets with informational placards for having dander or stapling trees with signs warning you against eating their leaves.

Don't eat their leaves.

trigger warnings are tolerable in certain settings(academia), and in rarer cases have a valid purpose I can get behind(warning labels, employment contracts), but they can quickly become unnecessarily burdensome, and trigger warnings for incidental appearance of incense in live experimental art shows by radical artists can fuck off.

If the artists can live out their bloody fantasies in the safety of an opera house, they might not take over the country and commit genocide, again.

Um... you might want to re-read that. It's not as uh.. "exciting" as you might think.

That's pretty foul. I have some sympathy for the patrons if that's the case. Nowhere that I read was cannibalism mentioned. I'd argue arresting those involved if that's the truth. Prions are fucking deadly serious and survive outside the body, after a person dies, and until picked up by something else. And they'll hop species too. The literal embodiment of the dark world, just pure evil anti-life. There's a proper analogy in some video game somewhere that I'm not finding at the moment...idk. it's like, imagine every prion is a burnt out crystal on an LCD screen. Once there's enough out there...it's game over.

But what if that money goes to art I don't personally like?

That a private enterprise wouldn't be able to make this work should give us a hint that it doesn't benefit enough people for it to be worthwhile, opera is a luxury good consumed by relatively few, relatively affluent people. Why should the taxpayer subsidize their hobby? Actors don't need a billion dollar opera house to perform, they could do it in a school auditorium if necessary. Those tax dollars could have been spent on any number of other things like healthcare and education.

And this relatively small amount of spending

This money is not provided by the federal government, or even the state. It is paid for by the city of Cologne.

1.5B€ is quite a burden on the finances of a city. Even if it is a large city. All for the benefit of a small elite, as normal people don't watch operas.