[contextly_auto_sidebar]
Audience engagement. Such a buzzphrase in the arts these days. The subject of the National Arts Marketing Project Conference, held in Salt Lake City November 6th through 9th.A conference full of useful suggestions, hopeful case studies. Success stories! In which arts organizations learned to engage their audience.
A week or so earlier, Matt Lehrman — a terrific “Audience and Customer Experience (ACX) expert” (as he describes himself) — and fellow ArtsJournal blogger — asked me about audience engagement. Did I have thoughts about it that I’d like to post on his blog? He was asking several people.
I was happy to oblige. But my thought was that I wish we wouldn’t use those words. Audience engagement — such an abstraction! While a truly engaged audience is anything but. It’s people lined up to get into a museum, or screaming with delight after a performance. (Or plunged into rapt silence.)
It’s people buying arts merchandise. Talking up the arts in their communities. So easy to describe and define!
So why do we make such a fuss about it? Read what I posted on Matt’s blog. When I worked in pop music, I said, “audience engagement” was a phrase nobody used. Why not? Because they had an engaged audience, one they could count on, day in and day out.
When we use the phrase, we’re confessing a lack. Confessing that our audinece isn’t engaged. Or that we don’t have an audience. Or not enough of one.
And that to fix this, we think in abstractions. No matter what concrete steps we might take. We’re still thinking of the problem in a way divorced from the real world — a world in which people are spontaneously engaged by art, and flock to take part in it.
More coming.
All this will be clearer if you read what I wrote for Matt. Unfair of me to reprint it all here, and deprive him of readers!
The term “audience engagement” is just another one of those modern catchphrases that spring up when organizations have lost touch with their “customers” as opposed to “patrons”. These people and their conferences and conventions are woefully out of touch with the basics, much like these overpaid architects who cannot build a modern concert hall with decent acoustics, and ruin the halls that used to have them. If one needs an example of “audience engagement”, they should have been at one of the Grateful Dead concerts held in Chicago this past summer. All three sold out concerts were held in a football stadium. Music lovers came from around the country, and some from overseas, to hear this legendary band. Streets, hotels, and restaurants were filled with old hippies wearing tie dyed t-shirts and bifocals. No need for “audience engagement” analysis there. Greg. You made an interesting suggestion “… I’d suggest going straight for the things I’ve listed…which you do by genuinely loving the art you do, and genuinely loving your audience” This is what is missing. These folks do NOT love the art or the audiences they claim to want to “engage”. If anything, they are intimidated by their audiences who they treat like “customers” rather than music lovers, seeking to extract money from their pockets without really caring about them as people. They have no real common ground with those patrons, and audiences sense this on some level.
Thank you for suggesting that we abandon the words ‘audience engagement’ entirely.
If arts professionals spent as much time doing actual ‘sales’ as they do talking about engagement, we wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not audiences are properly engaged.
And by sales I don’t mean telling the world how wonderful we are in emails and brochures and then sitting back waiting for ‘sales’ to come in, I’m talking about real, honest-to-goodness sales – which means stepping out into the world outside the bubble, finding likely prospects and convincing them to come.
If we’re not engaging with new audiences in their worlds, we have no business expecting them to engage with us in ours.
“Stepping into the world outside the bubble…” is exactly what arts professionals are not willing to do because it would involve dealing with people they are uncomfortable with – people unlike themselves. I’m talking about Blacks, Hispanics, and just about ayone who is not White and middle class, or preferable richer than that. What most arts entities daydream about is a young, hip, updated version of “old money” patronage (Think Carnegie, Rockefeller, Armour, etc.) to keep their arts fantasies alive. When it comes to so-called “minorities” all arts organizations fall into the same stereotypical mindset – Blacks=jazz, dancing, or something, and Hispanics=mariachi bands, tangos, and bongos. This is only the music element I am referring to, but the general compartmentalization of “others’ is what keeps the arts from freely blooming as they naturally could.
Absolutely on target, Greg and others. “Audience engagement” is a word similar in nonsensicality to the phrase “the music establishment’s deep bond with audiences.” Music managers’ promise of “quality” or “excellence”, is defined exclusively in establishment terms. Decades ago things already got to the point that if on occasion general audiences did hear fragments of music that really engaged their interest, they assumed it must be of poor quality. This is because, among other things, they constantly heard contemporary works that left them cold spoken of with the same laudatory terms used for classical masterworks. That convinced them that contemporary works of quality could only be judged by music professionals or experts. That statement has actually been made by Charles Rosen. Though he has a lively and enthusiastic style of writing, Alec Ross no doubt THINKS the same thing, though he doesn’t come right out and say it. .
When the managers need to boost ticket sales and have already pared away risky works, they increasingly turn to some aspect of “name” pop music or other pop performers tamed for more conservative audiences. They NEVER NEVER consider new music by composers whose orientation is to communicate with audiences. Performing the latter would label them as panderers fallen to new depths and lacking any semblance of artistic integrity.
Nonprofessional music lovers like me with the background and willingness to call spades spades rather than digging implements are vanishingly few. So we cannot expect any initiatives from the audience side. It’s pretty much a fruitless idea to pump up mainstream audience members to even participate passively in reform movements. My solution is to go for young people. But that’s a story for another time.
unqualified.