There is huge potential in Apple Computer’s new product announcements at yesterday’s Macworld Expo. Arts organizations should pay particular attention to the upgraded iLife software suite, which Steve Jobs called “the Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.”
Why should you care about a software suite from a computer company with such a tiny market share? Because it marks the beginning of what could be the next generation of amateur arts. And because Apple has proven pretty good at launching trends that grow to all computer platforms.
A long while back, amateur arts were the engine of professional arts. Community choirs, home concerts, painting groups, sewing circles, and the like, connected non-professional enthusiasts with all forms of performance and handicraft. It was like the Little League and Pee Wee Football is to professional sports — not generating a flow of professionals necessarily, but creating a generation of enthusiasts with direct experience of the game.
The professionalization of arts and culture over the past decades has crowded out or minimized such community efforts, contributing to the audience engagement issues we face today. (If you’re a real technology wonk, there’s a cool systems simulation of how this professional/amateur dynamic might work on-line…not for the faint of heart.)
So, what about iLife? It’s a suite of five programs that enable anyone to create, curate, and present a full range of cultural products — from photos, to videos, to DVDs, and now to self-produced music. Garage Band is the latest addition to the suite, containing a seriously powerful recording and production studio to make music. As with most innovations, all the pieces of this suite have been available for a while, but never so integrated, so user-focused, and so elegantly conceived for the everyday user.
These will be astounding tools for artists of all kind — inexpensive (the whole package sells for $49), powerful, professional-grade, flexible. But beyond that, they enable a new generation of creators — amateur artists who will grow a connection to aesthetics and expression not through outreach and education, but through doing it themselves. Their art will be family photo albums, wedding videos with pop song soundtracks, web sites, self-produced songs that only they hear. But they will be producing cultural work, regardless, and building a sensibility toward art and the artists who do this for a living.
Again, Apple alone can’t manage that revolution, but it has already launched it. Watch for Microsoft and others to follow suit, and to build a toolkit to enable a new kind of arts participant. The thoughtful manager of arts and cultural organizations will be looking for ways to harness that new energy.
