Last week, I walked by an Abercrombie & Fitch store, stopped, turned right, and started to walk inside. What the Joshua Bell is wrong with me, I thought: I don’t like Abercrombie clothes, I’m already late for a meeting, and there’s no obligatory hot preppy “greeter” guy at the door. It just felt so cool to walk in. <\/p>\n
Literally cool. The doors were wide open and the store was pumping AC into the street. Fancy hotels pull similar stunts in the winter: you’ll be hustling along, face-in-scarf, and then, all of a sudden, angels are singing and you’re briefly under heat lamps. Yes, maybe I will stay at The Plaza tonight, it’s warm, here is my credit card.<\/p>\n
So after narrowly avoiding Abercrombie<\/a> I thought, when have I ever passed a performance venue and had a desire to go inside? I walked by Carnegie Hall every day on the way to work at IMG, and never once did I see, hear or feel anything that made me want to go into that lobby. I walked by the Miller Theatre yesterday, or, at least I think I did, since I didn’t actually notice it in the mass of Columbia. There’s no effort toward creating a sensory experience: nothing to turn my head, let alone my feet. Moving beyond heat lamps and AC, what can venues do to get people in the door?<\/p>\n Give us some idea of what’s going on in there, most basically and importantly. It’s “Carnegie Hall” ((jazz hands)), but do people know the range of artists Carnegie presents? The posters wrap around the building, so unless you’re circling the block, you’re going to miss a lot of information. What needs to be pumped into the street outside Carnegie and any music venue, is, errrr, music. If I was walking along 57th street and heard past performances playing under Carnegie’s awning, I would stop and listen, probably every time. Ideally, there would be a screen outside the doors detailing who\/what\/when you were listening to, along with another screen scrolling the upcoming performances. Obviously, the rights for such a project would be a mild to moderate nightmare, since a lot of artists only allow their live performances to be recorded for archival purposes. If you can’t play concert recordings, work with the record labels and play CDs from the artists on the season. Play stock music – just connect with the hundreds of people who walk by your building every day. (Incidentally, our cool friends at Abercrombie & Fitch are also known for blasting music<\/a> inside and outside their stores.)<\/p>\n Another not-rocket-science idea is simply having screens in front of the hall playing concert video footage on loop. It would be amazing to see both historic and contemporary performances, and would really give the public a sense of the scope and legacy of the institution. It seems a bit counterintuitive not to include sound here (a la the ads at city bus stops<\/a>), but we’re all so video-obsessed that it probably wouldn’t matter.<\/p>\n TV at the bus stop and dance music at your clothing store. Cookie-cutter poster of artist holding violin at Carnegie Hall. Which will get my attention?<\/p>\n
![narrowly avoiding Abercrombie<\/a> I thought, when have I ever passed a performance venue and had a desire to go inside? I walked by Carnegie Hall every day on the way to work at IMG, and never once did I see, hear or feel anything that made me want to go into that lobby. I walked by the Miller Theatre yesterday, or, at least I think I did, since I didn’t actually notice it in the mass of Columbia. There’s no effort toward creating a sensory experience: nothing to turn my head, let alone my feet. Moving beyond heat lamps and AC, what can venues do to get people in the door?<\/p>\nGive us some idea of what’s going on in there, most basically and importantly. It’s “Carnegie Hall” ((jazz hands)), but do people know the range of artists Carnegie presents? The posters wrap around the building, so unless you’re circling the block, you’re going to miss a lot of information. What needs to be pumped into the street outside Carnegie and any music venue, is, errrr, music. If I was walking along 57th street and heard past performances playing under Carnegie’s awning, I would stop and listen, probably every time. Ideally, there would be a screen outside the doors detailing who\/what\/when you were listening to, along with another screen scrolling the upcoming performances. Obviously, the rights for such a project would be a mild to moderate nightmare, since a lot of artists only allow their live performances to be recorded for archival purposes. If you can’t play concert recordings, work with the record labels and play CDs from the artists on the season. Play stock music – just connect with the hundreds of people who walk by your building every day. (Incidentally, our cool friends at Abercrombie & Fitch are also known for blasting music<\/a> inside and outside their stores.)<\/p>\nAnother not-rocket-science idea is simply having screens in front of the hall playing concert video footage on loop. It would be amazing to see both historic and contemporary performances, and would really give the public a sense of the scope and legacy of the institution. It seems a bit counterintuitive not to include sound here (a la the ads at city bus stops<\/a>), but we’re all so video-obsessed that it probably wouldn’t matter.<\/p>\nTV at the bus stop and dance music at your clothing store. Cookie-cutter poster of artist holding violin at Carnegie Hall. Which will get my attention?<\/p>\nNote: I’ve been told video screens are going to replace the banners at Lincoln Center when the renovations<\/a> are complete, but I just spent the past 00:02:14 watching the “Lincoln Center Promenade Animation” and saw no such thing. The ticker of upcoming performances on the steps is pretty nice, though.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, I walked by an Abercrombie & Fitch store, stopped, turned right, and started to walk inside. What the Joshua Bell is wrong with me, I thought: I don’t like Abercrombie clothes, I’m already late for a meeting, and there’s no obligatory hot preppy “greeter” guy at the door. It just felt so cool […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/c\/cd\/Odysseus_Sirens_BM_E440.jpg\/571px-Odysseus_Sirens_BM_E440.jpg\"){kind=link}