This Week’s Insights: Measuring arts audiences has become a mania that even the measurers are skeptical of… Remember when artists could get rich by going “viral”?… Among the toxic ideas from Silicon Valley is that art is “content”… What matters when audiences choose orchestra concerts… Should artists control who see their work and how?
- Even The People Who Measure Audiences Are Worried About This Attempt To Measure Audiences: Arts Council England has this idea that arts audiences can be measured for the impact of arts on them. But Roger Tomlinson, who measures audience behavior for a living, has doubts about the value of basing arts grants on such measurements: “I have been commissioning research surveys for over 40 years and the Arts Council published my book ‘Boxing Clever’ on turning data into audiences in 1993… So, I ought to be welcoming the concept of quality metrics and what Culture Counts proposes to deliver for Arts Council England… But I am left with a lot of uneasy questions, mostly methodological.”
- Riches Through Social Media: Remember when we trying to figure out the power of social media and there were all these stories of artists getting rich by getting their work out to massive audiences? We haven’t heard so many of those stories lately. Well, here’s one – though it probably has less to do with social media than it does the subject matter. Still… this “24-year-old Canadian poet became famous when Instagram banned a self-portrait in which she was lying on her bed, with sheets stained by menstrual blood. “That banning got her 1.3 million followers to the site, where she publishes poetry and illustrations. She credits social media for its openness: “I used to submit to anthologies and magazines when I was a student – but I knew I was never going to be picked up. All their writing was, you know, about the Canadian landscape or something. And my poem is about this woman with her legs spread open.”
- Art Is NOT Content: One of the more corrosive ideas to come out of Silicon Valley is the idea that creative work is “content”. It most definitely is… and is NOT. “Content” implies that it is merely something to be conveyed, faceless, anonymous, generic, interchangeable – that that which is to be conveyed is secondary to the means of conveying it. And calling art “content” is useful how? When we call it that, audiences think about art in ways that are disposable, generic and interchangeable…
- What Do People Care About When Choosing To Go To An Orchestra Performance? The conductor? Famous names? The program? The place where concert is held? You might be surprised by the real motivations.
- How Much Control Should An Artist (Or His Or Her Estate) Continue To Have Over Work? Truth is, whoever owns rights to the work has absolute say over how it is done. This is not necessarily a good thing. David Mamet’s work, for one, comes with some big stipulations – some of them baffling and anti-audience: “During Outvisible’s run of Oleanna, which closed in early April, the creative team (as they apparently do with all of their productions) wanted to host talk back sessions with the audience, who had just seen the show. That was until they received contact from a Dramatists representative, who holds the license to Oleanna, on behalf of David Mamet himself. According to sources they were notified that if they proceeded to have these talk back sessions or ” anything like it were to happen within two hours after the performance, that we would be charged/fined $25,000.”
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