STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
street arts performances but include many indoor shows. These findings support the idea that
spectators do not attend by chance.
That particular audience can itself be divided into two groups. It consists, firstly, of spectators
who also have other highly-developed cultural practices. That is the ‘multicultural’ group
referred to earlier. It includes street arts in its spectrum of cultural practices, which shows that
offering a wider range of artistic forms benefits those who are already involved. Secondly,
nearly half those ‘aficionados’ have engaged in few if any cultural practices over the past years
and therefore attend nothing but street performances and festivals. Although they represent far
from the majority, within the non-public they represent a sub-group of street arts fans. In Ghent
42% of aficionados do not engage in much cultural practice. In Cognac, of the 29% who do not
practice much culture, 25% are aficionados. That means that today there is a niche audience,
which is purely amateur and no doubt knowledgeable, for street arts. Assuming that street artists
still want to reach untapped audiences, it can only be a good thing that they have managed to
attract a loyal following who are generally reluctant to engage in cultural practices.
3.3.3. Building up loyal audiences
We can identify a third type of audience within that composite and heterogeneous street arts
audience in Europe. As we have seen, what is known as the ‘conventional’ audience greatly
appreciates the freedom of movement, having the choice to stay or go, etc. The practice of street
performances is fairly relaxed. That ‘authorised zapping’ has a dual impact. On the one hand it
allows regular theatre-goers to try out a more popular practice, tending towards entertainment.
On the other hand, that exceptional freedom and the symbolic link it can establish with the
artistic event offered induces those who rarely or never engage with culture to attend street
festivals and performances far more frequently than any other cultural activity. The recognised
barriers to access to performances and art in general (having to go through the door, pay an
entry charge and, in some cases, not be able to leave when they want) disappear. The reality
here is that persons regarded as the non-public are present.
This novice audience has to be turned into a captive and loyal audience. Like street arts
themselves, the audience for this sector is characterised by certain paradoxes. The Eunetstar
survey tells us that 60% of festival-goers do not know what they will be seeing. Either they have
come upon the show ‘by chance’, by happening upon it, or they do not take the trouble to find
out more about the shows they are about to attend. These attitudes reflect a kind of floating
audience, more interested in entertainment than in deliberate cultural practice. That is shown by
the fact that only 20% of those questioned said they had looked at a festival programme. This
kind of approach is clearly characteristic of street arts and their open-air context. It can be
interpreted in two ways. It could reflect a certain disregard for the artistic quality of the event.
The spectator is not really making a choice. He is not selecting or appropriating the art work
because he does not know what he is seeing. Conversely, that kind of opportunist approach may
lead to the discovery of contemporary art forms that the spectator might never have deliberately
chosen to see.
This issue of the spectator’s relationship with the work is not specific to street arts, but they
illustrate it particularly well. The technological changes and aesthetic upheavals that have
marked 20 th -century art have clearly blurred the boundaries between culture and leisure, the
world of art and entertainment. According to Olivier Donnat, ‘the majority see leisure time as a
time for relaxation, pleasure and social interaction’. Street performances are situated at precisely
that crossroads: they are both an artistic production and entertainment. The number of people
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