I’m preparing this week to host the bi-annual alumni conference for the master’s degree I direct in Arts Administration. It’s always such a joy to welcome back graduates, to learn from them about their work, and to explore together a theme or trend that’s rising in our collective industry.
Our theme this year, ”The Rise of the Active Audience,” digs into the growing sense of imbalance in the way professional nonprofit arts organizations engage their communities. For several decades, we’ve been emphasizing the ”professional” arts experience — where the audience is expected to be quiet and receptive, and the art or artist is intended to fill that receptive space.
But there are signs that such a relationship isn’t the main game in town — or perhaps that it never was. Individuals are engaging aesthetic expression in a thousand different ways — by making art in handicraft or community arts, by curating their lives through Flickr and multimedia computer software, by adorning their world through fashion and design, and by taking control of their professional-grade cultural experiences with iPods and TiVo and the like.
Much of this isn’t new, but it’s nudging against the more traditional marketing and audience development methods of cultural institutions (and cultural managers). What are we to do about it among nonprofit cultural initiatives? How do professional arts organizations foster and encourage participatory practice in our communities, and is that part of their job? How can we rethink even the most professional of experiences as highly interactive? Or are we working along a spectrum of cultural opportunities that demands we focus even more narrowly on our point in that spectrum?
Theater director Anne Bogart has a wonderful perspective on the issue as it relates to live theater, says she:
The theater is what happens in the space between spectator and actor. It is an art form completely dependent upon the creative potential of each audience member in relation to the events on stage. Without a receiver, there is no experience. The receiver completes the circle with his/her own experience, imagination, and creativity.
I’m looking forward to the exploration with so many dear colleagues and friends.
Hi Andrew,
Please send my best to everyone in Madison this weekend. I wish I could be there. I’ll look forward to a report!
Steve Hoffman
Attitudes in the professional non-profit organizations must certainly change.
Far too many believe in a Platonic and elite Art -as though the more rigidly formal and further their product is in time from its initial creation or from natural regular life, the more it is Art; That virtue and Art are both the results of being removed from the wild, from the present moment, feeling and personal interpretation: That the audience, because it hasn’t spent twenty years studying the skills of a particular classical art form, knows nothing of the making of art in their lives.
But once those aristocratic ideas embedded in our entire culture are slayn, then the job of the professional artist is still to take the work time that their income gives them during the day, to master the skills and complexities of their discipline. But not only the skills. If
Art is a means to speak about being alive, the professional artist who lives daily within their discipline (just as those who are married keep daily faith with their partner)must endure all the varieties of personal suffering as well as the political and social suffering that comes with living in one’s own time and treat it as fuel for their art making. To do away with this professional level of doing art, or to expand it somehow to be more inclusive of all the other ways of doing art, would mean denying the desires and need of many human beings to collectively see and hear, publicly expressed, the highest and most complex formulation of the experience of being human on our planet, in our own time.
Because this level of doing art professionally exists, doesn’t mean that no other level has validity. The arts of the autistic, unfiltered by personal emotion. Community art making, art for personal therapy, art to make a political point, art for education and art in education, the art of medicine and the arts in medicine – all have their place. Fooling around creatively with fun digital tools and programs. The passionate arts of the young and the arts of those who’ve been at it all day for a lifetime. The art of the chimpanzee discovering more of the tools that are in the world to be used for purposes perhaps we haven’t yet named.
Were professional organizations to decide they had to manage all this creative complexity, they would be continuing the elitism which is the very problem.
Hi there,
Could you please provide a reference for the Anne Bogart quote in your essay above. Is it from The Viewpoints book or A Director prepares?
Thanks in advance!
Milly,
Sorry to omit the citation in the quote. It’s taken from her essay in the collected plays of the 1999 Humana Festival. Here’s the citation:
Humana Festival ’99: The Complete Plays
Edited by Michael Bigelow Dixon and Amy Wegener
Published by Smith and Kraus, 1999
Pages 4 and 5.
Thank you Andrew for the updated information. It is much appreciated.