Insight the audiences

Insight the audiences

by Manel Monta単es

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Insight the audiences ABSTRACT In this article we assert that there are at least two different and complementary ways to engage the art’s audience with the organisations, the artists and the arts itself. Marketing strategies are one of them perfectly indicated for the immediateness, to obtain the faithfulness of the spectator as a cultural consumer.

However, if our aim is to turn this consumer in an individual highly engaged with the arts and the organisations, to bring up his artistic competence is a must and probably the full guarantee of the survival of the arts and the culture at medium and long term.

The author: Manel MontaĂąes Former director of some important Spanish music and performing arts festivals and events as the Tarrega Street Theatre Festival and the music festival (MV) Mercat de MĂşsica Viva de Vic. In the last years he has been working for the Mexican FONCA (The National Trust for Arts and Culture) and the Canary Islands Government leading the MACC project (Atlantic Market of Contemporary Creation) among others.

Information and contact manel.monta@gmail.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/manelmonta

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Introduction Probably all the artistic and cultural institutions in the world belonging either to the public or to the private sector are deeply immersed in the development of marketing plans to apply to their organisations with the aim of making them sustainable through the years. This is because politicians, funders, companies or sponsors are constantly requesting evidences that justify the investment of their money.

Moreover, when the general circumstances of the economy are bad or when the cultural or social policies are under the rules of the staunchest defenders of the neo liberal economical thesis, the funds for culture, arts, education as well as other social policies can be seriously threatened by strong cuts. In some way, a good marketing plan can become a first remedy for those maladies.

A marketing plan is always a tricky grid of strategies focused on obtaining or increasing the best possible results of the cultural and artistic activity in terms of money and the organisations make important efforts analyzing the behaviour and the needs of their audiences with the aim to achieve their loyalty. The question at this point would be whether surviving for the organisations in turn is a full guarantee of the survival of the arts and the culture. If so, is it enough?

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Loyal costumers and smart audiences The consumerism enthroned as the global economic and political model has transformed all the previous conceptions of culture by reducing them to the immediate area of the now. Certainly, the consumer society has democratised access to culture, almost erasing the aspects that in other time as Pierre Bourdieu said, were designed to make and keep the class distinctions. Nowadays culture has just become another product and the culture vulture is just a consumer, an individual with a diversified artistic taste that needs to be constantly seduced.

Recent research from the Arts Council England having identified 13 distinct arts consumer segments, has estimated that 7 per cent of English adults have a high level of engagement with the arts, 66 per cent have some engagement, which means occasionally, whereas 27 per cent is not engaged in any way. By having a look at their attitude, behaviour or tastes about the arts, we can say that the major group is the segment mainly target of the marketing strategies from the arts institutions in order to obtain their assiduity. The success of these policies is mostly evaluated by the increases in the figures of attendants to the events but these advances may be always incomplete because in the same way an arts institution may gain more participation from a segment of a target audience, it may have leaks in the participation of another and this means going back and forth.

In order to get the levels of engagement that arts and institutions need from their audiences, beside good marketing strategies, we need to turn the loyal audiences into smart audiences and that collective intelligence is only reachable if the artistic competence of each spectator reaches the top possible level.

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Audiences and spectators With regards to the arts the word audience contains in itself a true contradiction. In a general way we are speaking about an audience when we designate a physical group of people that attend a show or use a specific cultural product or service.

Therefore, what we do is to designate as audience one homogeneous group of people. We also use other words like spectators, viewers, listeners, readers, etc, grouping the distinct types of people according to the cultural products that are used, enjoyed or practiced. However, if we talk about performing arts for instance, we have to admit that a theatre audience is not the same as a circus, dance performance or street theatre audience because each one of them has distinct characteristic shots: sex, age, training, ideological or aesthetic attitude, behaviour, level of knowledge or depth and frequency in the consumption or practice on the artistic matter referred. We ascertain therefore that there is not just one type of audience for the scenic arts or the culture in general but a plurality or diversity of public, which composition is relatively homogenous. Marketing strategies are based on the consideration of audiences as a collective of individuals predefined by the characteristic shots we mentioned before whereas the aim of empowerment actions seeks to improve the artistic competence of the spectator as individual in the same way as a good education system must do. Both are necessary.

The spectator’s role What is the role of the spectator in front of an artistic work? What happens between the artist or the performer and the beholder? What does the artists expect get from the spectator?

Tackling the role of the spectator in front of the art work is a controversial issue that relates to philosophical areas developed conceptually by a number of thinkers throughout the history of art : Montesquieu, Brecht, Kant, Adorno, Wittgenstein or

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Benjamin among others, plunged us into a set of abstractions about the aesthetics of art, artistic competence of the audience, the notion of taste or pleasure, the dialectic between fiction and reality, the semiotics of reception or the relationship between the performance site or space and the audience. We will not go into of all those matters but we want to notice that a spectator is always an active individual. Even the one who falls asleep in the middle of a theatre performance or in a concert manifests an active answer to the stage work. Either the viewer or spectator who seems to be attracted or immersed, or shows disaffection or lack of interest to an artistic work relates to the notion of aesthetics.

At this point we accept the Brecht’s idea which relates to the reception of the theatrical work, that we spread to every kind of art work, transforming the art of performing in an spectator’s art in opposition to the traditional perspective that always looks at the artistic structures for significance, ignoring the contribution of the mental and sociological structures from the spectator to the artwork sense but there is not an standard model in that reception. We know about the existence of a code set from that reception: psychological, ideological and aesthetic, as well as other elements that trigger the interaction between the beholder and the artistic work reaching in a formal way a greater or lesser existential quality of the artistic experience. Achieving this experiential quality and therefore the active response of the spectator presupposes that the stage or artistic experience is not limited or exhausted at the time of the reception; it begins before and it is projected after.

Empowerment processes and training of the beholder Following what Brecht said related to the theatre, the relationship between the performances or the artistic site and the beholder or audience space is always a controversial relationship between fiction and reality made up of an aesthetic distance. Modify, reduce or increase that distance is the essential key of the training actions with the aim to produce the beholder’s overall identification with the artistic work or even its conscious rejection.

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Therefore, we will understand this empowerment process as a kind of activity designed to reduce or eliminate the distance between the artistic work and the spectator with actions that seek to put the spectator to the same level in his relationship with the artist or the artistic work, through a training process that reinforces the beholder's artistic competence. In the words of Teixeira Coelho: "The knowledge that allows an individual or group, to locate a scenic or an art work in its own context." A Knowledge comprising stylistic elements, historical, biographical, etc., which identify that work at the artistic universe where it belongs. Anyway as the author points out, it is not an essential element in order to enjoy a work of art but it is a powerful add-on that enhances the pleasure of the beholder and that opens new ways of approach to the art work.

To conclude this first approach, we would like to assert that there are at least two different but complementary ways to engage the art’s audience with the organisations, the artists and the arts itself. Marketing strategies are one of them perfectly indicated for the immediateness, to obtain the faithfulness of the spectator as a cultural consumer. However, if our aim is to turn this consumer in an individual highly engaged with the arts and the organisations, to bring up his artistic competence is a must and the results of that activity at medium and long term the full guarantee of the survival of the arts, the organisations and the culture itself.

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