Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts

Stephanie E. Pitts, Sarah M. Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000167351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Museumsverwaltung

Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society.

The authors critically interrogate the challenges of access, diversity, privilege and responsibility in contemporary art. Asking who benefits from, pays for and consumes the arts, the book highlights fresh, forward-thinking audience and organisational attitudes that show the potential of live arts engagement to contribute to engaged citizenship. Complemented by comparative global analysis, the cutting-edge insights in this book are relevant for interdisciplinary researchers across audience studies and beyond.

Enhanced by a new framework for the understanding audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license here.

1 Introduction

Who goes to the contemporary arts?

‘Contemporary art’ is something of a contentious term. In the clichéd response to contemporary visual art, ‘My five-year-old could have done that’, there are connotations of simplicity, lack of perceivable skill and a fear of being taken for a fool. The Turner Prize, an annual award for British contemporary visual art, is a flashpoint for these negative stereotypes and attracts journalistic criticism (e.g. Reynolds, 2001) for works that are perceived to be weird, experimental, pretentious and without skill. A YouGov poll (2016) of 4,099 British adults found that only 28% considered A Fun Ride to Nowhere, an artwork in Josephine Pryde’s Turner Prize 2016 Runner-Up exhibition, to be a work of art (see also Smith, 2016). This survey additionally showed that broader, more inclusive definitions of art came from younger participants, those who were middle class, those in London and the South and those who voted to remain in the European Union. Attitudes to the arts are brokered along social divisions and reinforced by newspaper and social media choices to create both awareness and anger about the place of contemporary arts in modern society.

These stereotypes around the contemporary arts have proliferated popular culture as well. In internet culture, memes mocking contemporary arts have also emerged, such as the photo of a squirrel seemingly dancing, with the words ‘People will stop asking you questions if you answer back in interpretive dance’.¹ In a spoof of the old-fashioned Ladybird children’s books, Miriam Elia produced the sell-out We Go to the Gallery (2015), a satire of contemporary art galleries, in which a mother enjoys interpreting strange contemporary artworks, while the two children are just confused and unsettled. This story was mirrored in real life by two American teenagers who left glasses on the floor of an art gallery and then documented tourists taking photos of the ‘exhibition’, striking a chord amongst those who enjoyed seeing gallery visitors being fooled such as in this comment below a Guardian (Hunt, 2016) article about the story: ‘I wonder how many stood round, viewed them from different angles and then spouted a load of arty farty nonsense in a language only they understand.’ If there was any doubt as to whether these stereotypes persist, in the final stages of writing this book, the piece Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan consisting of a fresh banana taped to a wall caused public outrage when it sold for $120,000 (Ilchi, 2019).

Mockery of contemporary theatre and dance is also found in popular culture, with American sitcoms such as How I Met Your Mother and Community including episodes in which characters take part in weird and somewhat self-indulgent community drama and dance performances (Bays, Thomas, Kang, & Kellett, 2007; Harmon, Pomerantz, & Cackowski, 2010). In an episode of US sitcom Modern Family, the character Mitchell Pritchett is hoodwinked into attending an immersive theatre performance, which he describes as ‘the worst thing that can happen to a human during peace time’ (Levitan, Lloyd, Richman, & Walls, 2016, 0:04:50). Meanwhile, contemporary music is acknowledged as being something that even most audience members dislike, with Alex Ross (2010, 2007) lamenting the lack of cultural champions who might embrace new music in the same way that modern architecture and visual art are publicly defended.

These stereotypes around the contemporary arts in the UK are part of the context for this book, prompting us to ask how audience experience challenges and is challenged by these negative tropes. How does the public discourse impact on audience members’ willingness to engage with the contemporary and shape their experience of an artwork? How is it that some people find joy in new artworks? What are the routes that take them past stereotypes to meaningful engagement, and are these routes open to everyone? Who is and who is not engaging with the contemporary arts?

1.1 What is the ‘contemporary’ and who engages with it?

To explore this question of who forms the audience for the contemporary arts, we first had to grapple with what was meant by ‘contemporary’. This word was adopted for the project by default since it appears in the name of our first collaborating arts organisation, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (see Section 2.2.1), but has been problematised throughout. In the broadest sense, any art made today could be termed ‘contemporary’, but this did not seem like a meaningful definition, since it put highly commercial and popular artists in the same category as experimental and underground artists, so blurring the distinctions between the radically different funding structures, media prominence and venues that are part of the varied audience experience across recently made artworks. We therefore provisionally defined ‘contemporary’ as artworks which were both new and, in some way, innovative or challenging. This definition is, of course, highly subjective, and the personal way in which the contemporary is felt and experienced will be a running theme of this book. Indeed, while systems such as the Audience Agency’s art form coding call on arts organisations to ‘tag’ their events as contemporary, modern or other such categories within each art form, this does not necessarily map onto how the work is experienced by its audiences.²

Contemporary arts audiences are generally assumed to be small in number, well-educated and highly engaged arts consumers. However, the available audience attendance data gives a more complex picture. Audience Agency’s (Bradley, 2017) analysis of classical music subgenres suggests that contemporary classical music averages 111 attenders per concert, which is middle of the range between orchestral concerts (average 336) and community events (average 68). Their analysis points to these contemporary attenders being younger and more urban but does not suggest a particularly small audience for these events. Taking Part Survey (2016) data on dance audiences suggests that a slightly smaller proportion of the UK population attends contemporary dance (3.1% had attended in the past 12 months) than ballet (4.2%) and that contemporary dance attenders were also younger; however, Hanquinet, O’Brien, and Taylor’s (2019) analysis found contemporary dance to be less socially stratified than ballet. Furthermore, the UK bastion of contemporary art, the Tate Modern, is the country’s most visited attraction, with almost 6 million visits in 2018 (Visit England, 2019). The scarcity of audience attendance data that is broken down into contemporary and classical means it is difficult to conclude beyond observations and hunches that the contemporary arts attracts a smaller and more affluent audience, and these data often do not capture grassroots or DIY (from ‘do it yourself’) events, leaving many smaller events undocumented.

This project comes at a time of intense debate about the future of governmental arts funding in the UK and abroad. Recent policy developments have seen an increased focus on funding being used to broaden access to the arts, with the diversification of artists, arts workers and audiences being a key requirement for public funds. Furthermore, with recent initiatives such as 64 Million Artists,³ Fun Palaces,⁴ Creative People and Places⁵ and ongoing research into everyday participation⁶ and cultural democracy (Wilson, Gross, & Bull, 2017), the trend is very much towards work that is produced and programmed by local communities, in which diverse voices are heard and the right to creative practice is shared beyond professional artists. Attempts to open up access to the arts are to be lauded, though researchers have rightfully problematised the co-opting of arts to achieve social policy goals (Belfiore & Bennett, 2007). However, against this changing funding climate, it is becoming harder to justify the use of funding for events which are believed to attract an affluent and niche audience and are assumed to overlook the needs of the wider population.

The contemporary arts therefore act as a microcosm in which to investigate the arts sector today, raising challenging questions about the value of certain artworks over others and questioning the future direction of arts production in the UK. The contemporary arts organisations that we have collaborated with in this project (see Section 2.2.1) have often reluctantly been the ‘small fry’ in their city’s arts scene, with audience numbers, size of organisation or proportion of programming meaning that their role in the arts ecosystem is frequently overlooked, despite representing the cutting edge and, in theory, the future of each art form. Working collectively, across art forms and cities, has helped to identify the common challenges facing small arts organisations and so to articulate the contribution of contemporary arts to the provision of diverse and inclusive arts experiences.

This book aims to shine a spotlight on the contemporary arts in the UK today through the eyes of its audiences. We wrestle with the difficult questions around stereotypes of the contemporary, exclusion and access and the ways in which people feel shut out of the arts. However, we also reflect on the ways in which audiences find meaning in new work, considering how they find a way to engage with it, what kinds of attitudes they take to their arts events and the value they find in work that others may see as unskilled or alienating. In considering the idea of the contemporary in multiple art forms, we explore the ways in which audiences navigate the cultural ecology of their local area, and whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘contemporary audience’.

1.2 Origins

This project began as the unexpected outcome of a research seminar given in Birmingham in 2013 by Stephanie Pitts. After hearing her account of previous studies with audiences for classical music, Tim Rushby, then the marketing manager at Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), posed the challenge of understanding how audiences for contemporary music might be different. Specifically, Tim wanted to know whether there was crossover in audiences for contemporary arts: might visitors to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, just down the road from where BCMG gives its concerts, also be potential audience members? Likewise, might the audiences for the BE Festival, an international contemporary theatre programme in the city, also be attending BCMG concerts, without either organisation being aware of the intersecting cultural lives of their regular attenders? From these questions about attendance patterns came deeper provocations: did audiences seek comparable experiences of new work in multiple art forms, and could there possibly be a ‘contemporary arts audience’, a group of people who sought out the new in art regardless of form or style?

Faced with these intriguing questions, the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) team conducted a pilot study in Birmingham (2014–15), supported by the University of Sheffield’s Innovation, Impact and Knowledge Exchange fund. Led by Stephanie Pitts, Tim Rushby and research associate Jonathan Gross, a group of organisations who present contemporary art in the city were brought together to discuss the most pertinent themes for their organisation. This fledgling meeting of what later became Birmingham Contemporary Arts Network (BCAN) discussed the ways in which their challenge of ‘selling’ contemporary arts to audiences was considerably different to that of organisations producing classical or mainstream events, since the general public was often taught by the media that contemporary arts were pretentious and ‘rubbish’. They had also found that audiences tended to dismiss contemporary arts after one bad experience in a way that does not happen with film, for example, where one disappointing night out is quickly superseded by other more satisfying cinema experiences. Organisations were looking to learn more about what draws people to the contemporary and what puts people off in order to grow and diversify their current audiences.

The pilot study therefore focused on the following questions:

• Who is coming to the contemporary arts – and what experiences are they having of this work?
• What value do the contemporary arts have for audiences?
• What strategies are contemporary arts organisations currently employing to develop relationships with audiences – and what strategies might they employ in the future?

Qualitative research methods were employed in the pilot study for a number of reasons (outlined in full in Chapter 2). From the outset, we were seeking to understand engagement in contemporary arts from the audience’s point of view, embracing the ideas of challenge and difficulty identified in the public discourse and the experience of our partner organisations but then investi...