Flickr: Anders Adermark
Grant McCracken offers a fascinating glimpse at an emerging type of vacation experience, contrary to the ‘everything-planned-down-to-the-minute’ vacations of the past. He points to American Express Travel’s Nextpedition, where the destination, the itineraries, the meals, and the activities are all unfurled as you’re traveling — with each day bringing a next surprise.
He suggests that just as we’re all getting good at delivering exactly what our audiences expect, they now might start expecting surprise and discovery, randomness and noise. And that’s going to require us to retool and rejigger. Says he:
Culturematic randomness calls for a different concept of the producer and the corporation. We will have to cultivate the odd, the counter-expectational, to work off-grid and against the grain. It is not enough to be “quirky.” We will have to be something closer to original. This means that we are now embracing the very things we used to keep out of the system, the noise that obscured signal, the individual eccentricity that got in the way of “due diligence” and “due process.” To deliver randomness we will have to be on better terms with randomness. We will have to make this river run through us, instead of insisting that it identify itself at the front desk.
Fortunately for us, the live experience of artistic performance or artifact is ripe with opportunity for these surprises, these unexpected turns, these imperfections in the experience machine. Unfortunately, we’ve spent a good amount of energy over the past decades smoothing out the wrinkles and crawling toward consistency.
It may be time again to let your freak flag fly.
These strategies are not mutually exclusive, if you accept the premise that arts audiences are not monolithic. Some people are open to vacation surprises and some prefer going to the same beach at the same time every year. The challenge for arts groups is accepting the concept of segmenting its presentations for different audiences.
The only place I know that an orchestra with, say, a soloist, experiences the unexpected is in the encore. I have found an occasional encore to transport me to the edge of consciousness. How about a program whose first half is a concerto that is popular and a second half announced ahead of time to be exclusively encores chosen and performed by the concerto soloist. I would definitely attend, knowing that the soloist will choose pieces that he or she excels in instead of music selected by negotiation with the conductor or business manager./EFT