It's not the product, it's the connection

Re: marketing to Gen X: the common wisdom based on RAND and other studies is that when it comes to creating interest in the arts, if you don't catch 'em young, you lose 'em for good.

Obviously, it's important to optimize marketing approaches to the cohort born in the '60s and '70s, but this is a generation that, generally speaking, got the short end of the stick in its arts education, due to assorted economic and political reasons.

They also came up at a time when the arts were being culturally marginalized. The Boomer vibe was influenced by the highbrow Kennedy "Camelot" aura and a celebrity culture in which Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the ultimate Hollywood glamour couple, and Beverly Sills, Leonard Bernstein and Nureyev and Baryshnikov were mass-media figures; the latter two not just great dancers, but Cold War heroes.

Gen X, to the extent it was paying attention, saw political leaders make a whipping boy of the NEA; they were sold Hollywood glamour couples who were not apt to lead them to Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, and instead of the Beatles' omniverous example of prominently using classical influences to enrich rock, they grew up with the pointless musical debate over what it meant to be a true punk, and whether music that didn't hew to some outsider Independent/Alternative party line could ever be "authentic."

I don't think anything has changed in the '80s and '90s that might have enabled kids born in those decades to get a contact high on the arts by inhaling the cultural air around them.

So: should the institutional arts groups practice a form of triage and put everything into educational programming and educational lobbying, in hopes of winning the children born in this century and the tail end of the last one?

Under this strategy, they could rope in some Gen X and Y parents via their kids, all the while praying that the Boomers and pre-Boomers now sustaining the arts as audiences and donors will live long and prosper.

Or do they spread scarce resources more thinly and target the Xs and Ys along with the oldsters and the kiddies? Not an easy call.

Overhanging the arts, along with society as a whole, is whether America's leaders tackle the health care and Social Security crises in a way that avoids all-out generational warfare and reaches an equitable and economically sustainable solution.

Suggestion for cultivating Gen X-Y and doing a worthy deed: lifetime passes to museums, theaters and concert halls for Iraq War veterans. Maybe lifetime newspaper subscriptions, too.

I like this blog entry a great deal. I wonder what you all think about newspapers and their marketing efforts in the light of Bridgette's comments? I believe that USA Today has made some attempt in this direction. What about the rest of them?

I don't want to pull this thread too far away from Bridgette's original point, but I thought this might be an appropriate spot to link back to some older posts (before Flyover was on ArtsJournal--hence the weird formatting from the conversion) that touched on generational issues: one I did called "The Kids are Alright" and a follow-up by John called "The Kids are Alright, an Addendum."

These generational/demographic issues regarding content, the financial side of the arts, arts journalism, etc. are certainly worth revisiting. What I like about Bridgette's post is the way she grounds these larger issues within a specific local example. It makes me want to catch one of their productions the next time I'm in Michigan!

The "Peppermint Creek" company sounds very strong and forward-looking. And emphasizing connection, community and authenticity (Come See The Anti-Britney! Actors Who Can Really Act and Singers Who Can Really Sing!) seems like a good card for the arts to play in drawing Gen X in.

Sorry to always be harping on money, but the question facing groups like Peppermint Creek is whether they will seek, and their X-generation audiences will ante up, the bucks to support the creation of strong new work.

It's one thing to do well-chosen revivals; the expense becomes very high when you're talking about supporting the developmental theater that led to the creation of many of the shows the Peppermint people are programming, even a solo piece such as "I Am My Own Wife."

How fully will Gen X support the arts? It may find community and connection in the live experience, but it's the Greatest Generation's surviving old folks (and the dead ones' estates) and the graying Boomers who are paying the freight for first productions in big regional theaters that need to charge $30-plus a ticket to make their nut, and are tearing their hair out over how to get Gen X into the seats and onto the donor rolls.

Also, the generation of Authenticity has, in my experience, a tendency to falsely divide art into "commercial," "corporate" or "mainstream" works (and organizations) that are inherently suspect, and those imbued with an "alternative" or "independent" spirit that makes them inherently worthy.

Boomers who grew up with the Beatles, the band that aspired from the start and without apology to be "the toppermost of the poppermost," have no such damaging illusion, and are willing to recognize that talent is talent, and therefore worth supporting in ambitious, non-niche companies that one month might be offering LaBute, Sondheim or Kushner, and the next a Neil Simon revival or a big, Broadway-minded musical.

Will enough Gen Xers come to realize that organized arts means balance and compromise, that not every show can be challenging, that some have to be crowd-pleasers that, one hopes, are still artistically defensible and consistent with the company's mission?

Either Gen X has to sign on to supporting institutions not of its own creation (and therefore suspect?) or find a new and better way to give the performing arts a sound and sustainable business infrastructure.

Either way, there's a critical mass of money that needs to be accumulated in order to stoke and maintain a chain reaction of creativity. Clearly, live performance is going to remain a quaint "old media" minority niche in a tech-driven world, but that doesn't mean it can't occupy a large, lively and well-supported niche as opposed to one that's a dank and musty antiquarium. Your choice, Gen Xers, especially you with the bucks.

Excellent post, Bridgette. You've reminded me of an article I just read in the British magazine Prospect.

The author is Robert Sandall, a long-time executive of Virgin Records, and he writes about the decline of music recording but also the upsurge, the dramatic upsurge, in demand for the live performance.

Greater demand for the live performance might be like your observation that Gen X craves the more authentic experience, the connection and the community -- none of which can be gotten with a sterile recording, not even an iPod.

Here he tries to explain why:

A rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal source of music-making--and listening-- must lie near the root of this upending of the music business. As personal stereos and MP3 players have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn't just something that goes on between your ears. The guitarist of the American hardcore band Anthrax expressed this rather neatly: "Our album is the menu," he explained. "The concert is the meal."

In his book e-Topia, William Mitchell relates the increasing value of shared experience to the isolating nature of electronic or online virtual worlds. "In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs," he writes. Being in the same place at the same time as a live performance, music fans appear to have decided, is the rarest and most precious presence of all.