This Week: Why should anyone care what we wear to the theatre?… Big Data is helping indie bookstores thrive… Are our concert halls too big for the experiences we want?… Some thinking on how to connect artists to the larger world… The politics of demographics and aging.
- Does It Really Matter What You Wear To The Theatre? A full-throated complaint about attire by the NY Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli: “When people were invited onstage at a recent performance of “Penn & Teller on Broadway,” many women looked as if they had stepped out of a jazzercise class, while men ambled around in hideous cargo shorts.” But why does how people look matter, asks HuffPost’s Alexis Kleinman: “Theater today is ridiculously inaccessible as it is, and to tell people they have to dress a certain way to participate is unfair.” On the other hand – every sport and social event has its conventions. Have we so weakened what we ask of audiences that we’ve stripped some important pieces of the rituals?
- Revenge Of The Data – We Love Books! There was a time that Big Box book chains used data to crush smaller independent bookstores. But the cost of collecting data and acting on it has dropped so that indies can use it to their advantage.“It’s a bit of tech innovators being hoisted by their own petard: the massive drop in cost in back-office software and computers has benefitted small stores as much as a large ones. It costs much less now to do much more than a decade [ago], reducing overhead and improving efficiency.” At the other end of the publishing chain – publishers are finally getting usable data to inform their decisions. “Digital books made it possible to track the way people read and companies like Amazon and Apple could gather that data, but didn’t share it with publishers. Now a number of businesses have sprung up that specialize in reader analytics and they are sharing their findings.” Does this mean that the gut-instinct of great editors will recede in importance?
- Classical Music’s Big Boxes Problem: Over the past few decades dozens of new concert halls have been built all over America, and we have spent billions on their construction. But there’s a problem, argues NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini: “Inevitably, a sense of separation, of sound traveling across distance, affects performances in spaces the size of most concert halls. Less imposing halls need to be found for the symphonic repertory.” The thought had been – build bigger halls and more people can come in. More people equals more revenue. It didn’t turn out that way. Oversized halls have sometimes sterilized what ought to be a more intimate live experience.
- How To Connect Artists (And Art) To The Bigger World: We can keep performing to the audiences we have. And they’ll shrink. But how do artists make an impact on a wider swath of people? One music festival put a science pavilion at the center of its venue. Why? “What we do is help people bridge that gap themselves by stimulating them. The trick is communication. Music is about communicating emotion. Science is about discovering facts, but if you can’t communicate them there is little point in discovering them.” Then there’s trying to connect arts to issues of the day, where the arts have something to say: “Art opens us up to new ideas – so important always, but crucial now as the world seems to be losing its peripheral vision. We can all take refuge in our echo chambers, but the danger of cutting ourselves off from other ideas – or from ideas, period – is in vibrant display at the moment.” David Brooks ponders the role of artists in our fraught political environment: “As usual, there were a ton of artists and musicians at the political conventions this year. And that raises some questions. How much should artists get involved in politics? How can artists best promote social change?
- We’re Aging. Will Our Arts Age Too? Barry Hessenius ponders the politics of aging and where the arts fit. “Some industries will forsake the senior audience, other industries will court it. And those decisions are likely the result of research and judgments. Which end of the spectrum will we end up on, and is it likely some arts organizations will embrace the senior growth market, while others of us, flee from it?”
The fine arts will always have an older demographic because it has more natural appeal to that age group. Pop music, for example, is specifically marketed to young people and is naturally mostly about sex since mother nature gives them a preoccupation with matters of reproduction. That’s not such a big topic for 60 year-olds.
It’s difficult to list the reasons the fine arts naturally appeal more to older people, but I think some general reasons can be defined without essentializing: more maturity, an appreciation for slower paces corresponding to aging bodies, the propensity to be less active and think on average a little more deeply, a natural inclination to be less rebellious, an increased appreciation for formality of expression, and what have you. These things come with age. And of course, this is only speaking of averages. Many young people love the fine arts and many older folks remain hipsters, but the overall pattern I describe remains.
So it’s not that the fine arts audience is getting older, but that it will always by nature draw an older public. As boomers, yuppies, Gen Xers, and millennials age, they are or will become a large part of the audience for the fine arts.
Other factors, such as education, concepts of promotion, and accessibility could significantly alter these patterns, but we need to be clear about the natural relationship between the fine arts and more mature people.
And to make matters even more complex, we know that grandpa isn’t entirely content with this situation. If somehow rejuvenated, he’d be out chasing 25 year-old chiquitas at rock concerts in a second. And there are a lot of young people who find the media directed toward them completely idiotic, even if most can’t afford a really good seat at the opera.