{"id":704,"date":"2014-01-26T12:22:03","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T17:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/?p=704"},"modified":"2014-01-26T12:50:59","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T17:50:59","slug":"preamble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/2014\/01\/preamble.html","title":{"rendered":"Preamble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"We-the-people\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Welcome to We the Audience, <\/b>and thank you for joining me in what I hope will be a rich and rigorous dialogue about the meaning and value of the arts in the live + digital era.\u00a0 I appreciate this opportunity (thank you Doug McLennan) to be in a conversation with smart industry people who really care about ideas and about improving our cultural ecology.\u00a0 I hope the benefit for my fellow AJ readers will be the same\u2014the chance to push our thinking forward and to learn from each other.<\/p>\n

As I write in my biographical note<\/a>, my background as a cultural historian, a playwright\/director and a cultural policy theorist informs my ideology and my writing style: a blend of history, theory, observation and storytelling.<\/p>\n

As I write in my manifesto<\/a>, I believe that our goal as arts workers should be to empower audiences to engage in constructive and pleasurable dialogue about the arts and to celebrate those audiences who, by virtue of their vital and engaged presence, can turn any arts space (live and virtual) into a site of public assembly ripe for intellectual and emotional connection.<\/p>\n

I think our vision should include offering twenty-first-century arts goers a bill of rights assuring that every member of the audience has by definition not only the right to interpret but also the right to be heard as a viable interpreter.\u00a0In order to create a more perfect union of arts workers and arts audiences for the twenty-first century, we need to acknowledge that when it comes to making meaning and ascribing value, our audiences want to have a voice, and they want that voice to matter. All of us\u2014arts workers and audience members alike\u2014want the opportunity to formulate and exchange opinions about the arts events we see, hear, and feel.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know exactly how this blog will unfold, or what territories we\u2019ll wander into together. But I can assure my readers one thing. I\u2019ll never use the phrase \u201caudience-centered cultural institution\u201d here, because, to my way of thinking, that expression is a redundancy.<\/p>\n

The audience is us.<\/p>\n

This blog\u2019s central notion\u2014that arts workers (producers, presenters, funders, artists, arts educators) should be enlisted to help in the creation of an audience that knows how to engage in productive meaning making (including a good argument)\u2014challenges both the power of interpretive gatekeepers and the audience\u2019s tendency to relinquish their fundamental responsibility to make meaning.<\/p>\n

I plan to begin my new adventure as a blogger by spending some time over the next few weeks laying out my theory of social interpretation and the role that pleasure plays in engaging audiences. Much of this thinking comes from my new book, Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era<\/i><\/a> (Palgrave Macmillan). It\u2019ll take me a few posts to introduce key concepts and to dig into three guiding provocations:<\/p>\n

1. The deep pleasure of arts going is located in the meaning making process surrounding an arts event (and not solely in spectating\/moment of reception).<\/p>\n

2. Social interpretation is the most effective way to achieve pleasure in the meaning making operation. Furthermore, social interpretation used to be the standard way to measure both the value and impact of the arts. Further than that, everything old is new again: a wide range of contemporary participatory cultures have put social interpretation back in the driver\u2019s seat, and for good reason. Social interpretation is pleasurable in a satisfyingly complicated way.<\/p>\n

3. The more audiences are invited to participate in social interpretation the more adventurous (sophisticated) arts consumers they will become.<\/p>\n

Intrigued? Then please keep reading. I\u2019ll dig much more deeply into these three provocations over the course of the next three posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to We the Audience, and thank you for joining me in what I hope will be a rich and rigorous dialogue about the meaning and value of the arts in the live + digital era.\u00a0 I appreciate this opportunity (thank you Doug McLennan) to be in a conversation with smart industry people who really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":705,"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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}