This Week’s Insights: Everyone wants community – but what, exactly?… A revolution that’s engulfing the arts… Some insights on how audience habits are changing (from a historical perspective)… Can you judge audience impact with heart monitors?… Why do we still have intermissions?
- Everyone’s Saying People Want Community. But What Does That Mean? It’s not a new notion, really, but the rise of social media has everyone talking about the importance of building community around what you do. But it might be that our notions of community have changed significantly. Megan Garber writes that the rise of today’s version of community has something to do with a growing distrust of yesterday’s institutions. “It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community.” That change is on display in many facets of American culture, political and otherwise. So what does it mean to be an institution trying to build community?
- A Revolution Is Going On In How People Relate To The Arts: The Chicago Tribune’s theatre critic Chris Jones reports on a fascinating conference about engaging in the arts. The revolution has to do with who passes judgment on art, how it gets shared, and what our expectations are in an arts experience. “This new radical democratization threatens critics, just as it does well-paid artistic directors, executive directors, curators and all kinds of other gatekeeper types in the cultural universe, which explains why some say we/they react defensively to any grass-roots rebellion.”
- Also From The Conference – Data On Changing Behavior Of Audiences Engaging In Art: “In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans generated much of their own art by themselves and at home, through playing parlor piano, reciting Shakespeare around the dinner table, and other exercises in Emersonian self-reliance. All that changed with the introduction of radio, sound recordings, movie theaters, and other forms of industrially produced mass entertainment. The audience’s role increasingly was reduced to coming to a large venue, sitting in a darkened room, then applauding on cue.” Now the audience is roaring back again, wanting to participate in ways that matter, and increasingly wanting to define the terms of that participation.
- How To Tell Impact Of A Performance? How About Heart Monitors? So here’s the setup. The Royal Shakespeare Company plans to use the monitors to measure audience response to a live performance versus a simulcast one. “The idea is to measure not only whether one medium is more or less emotionally involving, but also whether violence in mainstream movies has desensitized screen viewers to the brutality in the play. And which play’s brutality will be the test case? The one that’s really notorious for gore.”
- Changing Times, Changing Intermissions? Critics in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both weighed in this week about the issue of intermissions. Why do we need them? Aren’t they an outdated convention from an earlier time? Or have our social-media-addled attention spans impatient with longer work? “The stretching out of plays by intermissions might make sense for producers worried about the sales revenue of overpriced food and drink. But the practice is a holdout from an era when people had discrete work hours, less harried commutes and minds that were free of Facebook, Twitter and email nudges.”
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