So, what’s an arts manager to do if the premise of yesterday’s post is true (which it seems to be) — that the history of audience interaction with art has been more active than passive, and that the current emphasis on sitting quietly and receiving art is an anomaly? What, especially, are you to do if your cultural facility was conceived and constructed during that anomalous moment in history? Are we even built for the kind of audience connection and collaboration our past suggests is the norm?
According to Lynne Conner and others at our recent conference, the answer is a challenge. We have certainly tried to build ”engagement” through pre-show and post-show discussions — although even many of these have been lectures or one-way conversations about what audiences should know about the work. And the art moment, itself, remains a sacred moment for many that shouldn’t be altered or invaded with chatter (unless that’s part of the moment).
Conner suggests that the solution lies in encouraging co-authorship — inviting, supporting, and encouraging audiences to recognize and celebrate their active part in making meaning. She describes the requirement of that strategy:
This, then, is the practical, bottom line definition of co-authorship in the twenty-first century; a critical mass of surrounding arts experiences that converge in and around an arts event in order to provide useful information, opportunities to process that information through talk and other forms of personal expression, and finally, some kind of follow-through experience that allows for synthesis, analysis, debate and (at least some of the time) consensus on the meaning of the arts event itself.
For many artists and arts organizations, this is already their core value and purpose. For others, the idea might feel awkward and populist — ”we must meet great art where it stands, there’s no meeting in the middle” they might say. But perhaps its the ”middle” where the art exists in the first place. Not with the artist. Not with the audience. But in the electric space between them.
Just a thought. More to come.
Jason Neulander says
This is exactly the kind of thinking we’ve been doing at my company Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, Texas. We’ve been creating pre-show performances that engage the audiences in the lobby before shows, holding post-show parties and discussions, creating interactivity through curtain speeches and drawings for tickets. The audience even gets to choose their own ticket price ($12-35, general admission). Also, we’ve begun using our web site to encourage interactivity beyond the night of the show, most recently through an “audience comments” section where we encourage our audience to post their own uncensored reviews of the show (in other words, they can post negative reviews if they want). The results have been clear–the audience has a significantly stronger ownership over the work. Our attendance and box office are both way up.
Joan says
Medieval culture till the nineteenth century -Was it really active participation in the arts by an aware Everyman/woman? Do you really want to return to a past age for our justifications for changes to the ways we present the arts?
Earlier the formal arts were for rulers or gods, and made only by the artisans who were the servants of identified ideas and special individuals in a state. The common individual’s personal cultural world was SEVERELY limited. What goes on in a theatre or gallery is not the sum of culture or even of any art form. In the nineteenth century the musical development of the personal voice of the composer begun by Beethoven moved rapidly outward in step with philosophers of his and later years. Culture became the language of social discourse, of political statement, and of supreme personal and emotional expression.
The ability to hear the personal in art is actually an evolutionary advance, one which is absolutely contrary to the idea of class elitism. But what the personal in art is absolutely dependent on is a universal and personal education which includes the use of the arts as essential to being a free human being. Either that or the total abolition of formal arts. Remember the statues of the Buddhas blown apart by the Taliban? More than religion was expoded that day.
Audiences aren’t starved for fancy concerts- they’re starved for personal arts education and personal creative work themselves. In fact, I really believe that arts education is our number one tool in the War Against Terror. I think that wars against terror are actually everywhere being fought privately as a struggle against today’s darknesses; inaccessible darknesses which have no voice and do not seem to answer to small individual human calls of despair. Cultures can be built upon this terror just as much as they can be built on individual freedom and creativity.
Access to the tools of the arts and the freedom to make personal statements is essential to being able to hear and use the arts as personal expression. Perhaps we don’t need arts managers to change audiences as much as we need Arts Policy Makers and arts advocates to convince governments in North America that arts education is absolutely essential in every way to our future maturity. And yes, if everyone is not to be given an arts education anytime soon, it will be up to the arts managers to pursuade presenters to educate their audiences, to survey their needs, to get to know their limits and urge them on to be creative themselves.
Stuart Scadron-Wattles says
We are clawing our way back from decades of neglect and complacency on this subject. Higher culture organizations must now pay attention to (speaking roughly) three groups of art patrons: children, so that a future can be built, the 20-40 somethings looking for meaningful interactions and family pursuits, and the 50-60 crowd that is resisting change in their arts organizations.
The solutions for each of these areas of relationship will differ depending upon the art form, the city/community, and the artistic mission, but only if we can re-establish meaningful (as opposed to dutiful) interactions will we have been anything more than part of the problem.