STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
who say they particularly like the festive atmosphere at festivals is enough to prove that, as is
the large proportion of people who attend them with friends and family. Perhaps that is where
we may see the emergence of an audience on the margins of the conventional means of
engaging with art and culture. Yet this marginal practice must not let us forget that the objective
of the artists, and of the festival organisers, is to bring about an encounter between art and the
public, in order fully to reconcile the artistic and social dimensions of cultural development.
Conclusions
• The survey conducted by the Eunetstar network supports and clarifies the results of local
surveys of street arts audiences and national and international surveys of live
performance audiences. Although street arts are also partly determined by socioprofessional
and educational factors, they still manage to bring together more diverse
and more popular audiences. Moreover, street arts audiences have several distinguishing
features.
• The street arts public is particularly heterogeneous. That is shown by the capacity of the
artists to reach the population in all its diversity. All age groups are represented there, as
are all socio-professional categories. Although the distribution between them does not
exactly reflect the national averages, what are usually the most under-represented, if not
absent, classes of live performance audiences are well represented.
• The heterogeneous nature of street arts audiences attracts composite audiences with a
variety of cultural practices and attitudes. Spectators used to the code of the indoor
performance are found side by side with fans solely of street arts and with new spectators
whose attention still needs to be drawn to that art form.
• Numerous factors intrinsic to the street arts partly explain these findings, which have a
welcome democratising aspect. Freedom of access, performance in the public space that
becomes a shared space, free access (where applied), the festive atmosphere and, above
all, the desire to relate to the audience that is integral to the artistic creation are valuable
variables of which the audiences are very aware.
4. In search of the non-public: street arts at the forefront
‘The relationship any piece of street arts has with its audience will always differ from the
relationship that more formally staged pieces have. Street arts audiences can always, and often
will, walk away from work if it does not engage them sufficiently. (…) The audience is
participating in an event within a specific situation, and in a specific spatial context, in a way
that is qualitatively different from the way in which a theatre audience relates to a play. It is the
freer relationships with the audience, and with the environment, which cannot be controlled that
are the defining characteristics of street arts. The challenges that come from these relationships,
and the opportunities for spontaneity that they present, provide a depth of inspiration and
stimulation for the artist that more traditional forms often cannot’ 355 .
355 Hall, Felicity, Strategy and report on street arts, op. cit.
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PE 375.307