Clayton Lord on new art and new audiences
This past Saturday, I took a drive through a ferocious, and unseasonably late, rainstorm to the house of an eleven-year-old theatregoer named Sydni. I was interviewing Sydni and her mother, Sarah, as part of the research into the intrinsic impact of art that we are conducting/commissioning at Theatre Bay Area, in this case video interviews with a small group of everyday theatre patrons to understand why they go to theatre, why they value it, and what it means to them. We were … [Read more...]
What is actually neurologically involved in communication? What does it take for a speaker to convey something to a listener, and what does it take for that listen to both comprehend what's being said and remember it? In a paper published in August 2010 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) called (dryly) "Speaker-listener neural coupling underlikes successful communication," three researchers from Princeton University detail an experiment that … [Read more...]
San Francisco is big on non-profit alternatives. I know this because we’ve done some asking around (and looking at other research) as we attempt a brand realignment on our TIX Bay Area discounted ticketing service. It turns out that, all other things being equal (a big caveat), a good percentage of Bay Area consumers will opt for a socially-helpful version of a service over a straight-up corporate one. As such, we will be touting the fact that we’re the only non-profit ticketing vendor in … [Read more...]
This post originally appeared on the National Endowment for the Arts' Facebook page. The true value of art cannot be measured in economics alone. If that were the case, we’d be in trouble. It’s impressive that, per the new NEA research note Time and Money, the cultural industries contribute $70.9 billion to the U.S. annual GDP—but the total U.S. annual GDP is $14 trillion, which basically means the entire cultural sector contributes .51% of the entire GDP in any given year. On any given … [Read more...]
What we traffic in is memories. Theatre, particularly, but all the arts, are representations of abstracted or concrete parts of this world, pushed out from artists to audience with the goal of sticking in the head. We are memory makers, and it's important that we try not to forget that when we're building out experience packages and talking about the value we have to audiences in our materials. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics, has spoken eloquently … [Read more...]
David Brooks, primarily a political columnist and commentator, has written a book attempting to understand some of what makes us function as human beings, and as a collaborative society. He discussed the book, The Social Animal, in a recent TED Talk of the same name. He says: “For centuries, we have inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we are divided selves. Reason is separated from the emotions, and society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the … [Read more...]
These past few weeks three things happened that got me thinking about the linguistic disconnects between us as artsmakers, those who advocate for us, and those who are supposed to be listening to that message. A crazy dance occurred in Washington around the budget and the possible defunding of the NEA (result: a haircut and the threat of a guillotine next fall). Artists and adminstrators from across the country marched on Washington for Arts Advocacy Day. And I frantically worked to build … [Read more...]
In March, arts advocate Arlene Goldbard spoke at the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations conference in Austin. Goldbard believes we need to start using a more empowered (and less-numbers-based) vocabulary for arguing for the value of the arts. At one point she noted: “The best argument for arts education is that children today practice endlessly interacting with machines, developing a certain type of cognitive facility. But without the opportunity that arts education affords … [Read more...]
As an industry, the arts suffers from a value problem. This was thrown into sharp relief for me in an interview I had with an artistic leader from rural Wisconsin, who pointed out, “We’re all bean counters because the people we deal with, what they count is beans.” In almost everything we do to advocate for the arts, we place financial worth front and center, and in so doing we allow, even encourage, the people we’re trying to convince of art’s value to forget that that value is much … [Read more...]
I believe that art makes better humans, but that that can only happen when the line from art to audience is as taut, clean and consistent as possible. The interplay between artmakers and audience members is central to what we do and vital to the success of the enterprise. That crackle across the wire, that static in the air at a live event, is good. It makes your ears hum, your hair stand on end--it's what connects people in a room behind and in front of the fourth wall. As Tom … [Read More...]
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