Should theatres listen to consultants?

Grote, I think, worries too much. While study authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak seem to know quite a bit about marketing and statistical matrices, it turns out they don't seem to know very much about art (they call a work of art's context "grease on the wheels of impact", which had me giggling). More than anything else, the report reads like one of the wifty rationalist projects that Jonathan Swift effectively destroyed in the third book of Gulliver's Travels.

In order to assess the impact of a work of art, Brown and Novak came up with six "impact constructs." A "Captivation Index" "characterizes the degree to which an individual was engrossed and absorbed in the performance"; an "Intellectual Stimulation Index" "encompasses several aspects of mental engagement, including both personal and social dimensions, which together might be characterized as 'cognitive traction.'" Seemingly objective, but not really: as usual, the authors' artistically conservative slip is showing. The "Emotional Resonance Index" "measures the intensity of emotional response, degree of empathy with the performers and therapeutic value in an emotional sense." Brecht's decidedly non-empathetic theatre isn't even in their sights. A form of drama like that of Howard Barker or Sarah Kane, which denies that theatre should be "therapeutic" at all, is likely to be entirely off WolfBrown's radar.

Responding to Grote's demurral at another blog, Brown demonstrated his own high ranking on the Irritability Index. "Mr. Grote's knee jerk reaction to the idea of the study, without even reading it, is an unfortunate illustration of how some artists and curators hide behind the kryptonite shield of their artistic license while their institutions grow sadly out of touch with audiences and community," Brown protested.

Neither a work of art nor a marketing study exists in a vacuum, of course. While the authors believe that the study's impact scores "should not be used as a means of evaluating or comparing artists or the worthiness of their performances", Wolf and Novak hope that the information "might be used by presenters in understanding the consequences of their programming choices and reaching higher levels of effectiveness in their work". It's naive, though, to think that ultimately programmers and curators, in a time of shrinking support for the arts, may not accept and reject work for their seasons based upon the narrow "impact constructs" that WolfBrown defines. They might even hire WolfBrown to conduct a study to see what kinds of work they should programme.