It\u2019s easy to understand why arts workers (presenters, producers and artists) were and are still invested in creating a reverent space for spectating. An assumption about the reciprocal relationship between silent listening\/quiet viewing and deeper attention (and thus appreciation) has informed the way in which cultural history has been narrated as well as the way in which artists and producers have measured the success of their work (\u201cThe audience was rapt with attention.\u201d). Beginning in the late eighteenth century, for example, concerns over proper etiquette inside music venues were conflated with the aesthetic theory of \u201cattentive listening,\u201d a term used to describe the kind of intellectual effort thought necessary to fully appreciate sophisticated music. As musicologist Matthew Riley notes<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>this emerging standard was a by-product of Enlightenment notions of \u201cabsolute music\u201d and \u201cart religion\u201d demanding a \u201creverential attitude on the part of the listener that previously would have been more appropriate in a place of worship.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Worshipping art is a beautiful and noble human predilection. But so is arguing about it. Gatekeeping promotes the former and marginalizes the latter. I contend that a healthy arts ecology (like any healthy environment) requires both.<\/p>\n Do we need trained, talented, professional interpreters in today\u2019s arts ecology? Yes, of course. Interpretive expertise is related to the Latin word exegesis<\/i>, meaning to explain, and the Greek word h\u0113geisthai<\/i>, meaning to lead. The spirit of this etymology is worth considering: like all learners, audience members do need to be \u201ctaught\u201d the information that informs the history and aesthetics of a particular piece of art. But it can\u2019t end there. There are very sound biological and cultural reasons why the contemporary science of learning has redefined \u201cknowing\u201d from \u201cbeing able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m a college professor who teaches a range of subject matter around the performing arts, from theater and dance history to playwriting to arts activism. I make my living as a kind of gatekeeper, in the sense that I choose what items to focus on and I employ my knowledge base to contextualize them. But I hope that I use my expertise in order to cultivate a meaning-making environment rather than to prescribe the meaning. The word cultivate derives (I\u2019m big on etymologies, so bear with me) from the Latin cultivatus, <\/i>meaning \u201ctilled.\u201d In biology, for example, to cultivate refers to the tilling of micro-organisms in a nutrient medium.<\/p>\n When it comes to the contemporary arts industry, what is our nutrient medium? How do we till the environment around the arts events we produce in order to cultivate understanding and thus greater engagement and pleasure? In my new book<\/a> I offer a nutrient in the form of audience learning communities.<\/p>\n The term \u201clearning community\u201d surfaced in the 1980s as a way to define a shift in attitude acknowledging learning as a cultural practice as opposed to an individual process. Based on the \u201ccommunities of practice\u201d work of social learning theorists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, a learning community allows participants to take new knowledge, skills, or attitudes and practice them by sharing their experience with others in the community and by actively reflecting on their process. In doing so, learners are thought to be participating in the negotiation of meaning.<\/p>\n In my book I explore the ways in which audience members are de facto learners (and I look carefully at the biology and social practices associated with adult learning). I also devote considerable space to describing strategies for engineering learning communities to support the desire to learn in and through our arts-going experiences. My goal is twofold: 1) to encourage arts workers to see meaning making as part of the art-making and the art-delivery systems; and 2) to help arts workers build a culture of productive talk (which by definition includes interpretation) into their organizations and communities.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because I believe that audiences want to be engaged in a process of making sense of the world through their connection with the arts event unfolding in front of them. And I believe that people who experience the arts in an engaged hermeneutic manner find opportunities for critical and imaginative thinking, learn how to exercise and defend their own aesthetic judgments, and revel in their capacity to feel, to think, to communicate, to wonder and ponder, to share, to listen, and, perhaps, to collaborate toward the common good.<\/p>\n![\"PetriDish\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/PetriDish-300x252.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n