the limitations of audience development - Arts And Audiences

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The limiTaTions of audience developmenT manifested in the activities of everyone in Norway who works every day to disseminate or market publicly-funded culture. I would like to stress that my concern here is publicly-funded culture. The opposite of publicly-funded culture is the private, profit-maximising culture industry, which is concerned with precisely the same, but with the focus on marketing products that can generate a profit. Only customer segments with a market potential are of interest, and products (i.e. artistic works) that do not contribute to this potential are not given priority. As far as I know, producers and decision-makers in this part of the arts and culture sector are not concerned with audience development. Their challenges are in many ways less complicated. My primary focus in this article will therefore be on publicly-funded culture. Audience development is based on a desire to democratise the part of the cultural sector that cannot survive in a private market and that the authorities intervene in and fund. This is nothing new, and nor is it typically Norwegian. Most countries in Europe have had audience development (insofar as there is consensus on what the concept entails) as an important cultural policy goal for almost 60 years. The extent to which this is followed up in practice is another matter, and criticism similar to that made by Anniken Huitfeldt has been voiced in many countries. To be able to arrive at good audience development strategies, and to debate this issue, we need an understanding of what audience development actually is. I do not believe there is consensus on this issue in the Norwegian arts and culture sector and this is not unique to Norway either. audience development in a cultural policy perspective The quest for the origins of audience development cannot be separated from the idea of democratising culture, i.e. making cultural activities available to as many people as possible, across geographical and social dividing lines. In the UK, the term access is used. It refers to the principle of making arts institutions more accessible to both large audience groups in general and to special groups, such as young people or people from non-British backgrounds. It is important to note that the discourse on cultural policy has not suggested that these barriers to increased audience figures should be addressed by changing the artistic programme. There are nonetheless many examples of organisations implementing artistic or programme-related changes in order to remove barriers or to reach larger audience groups. The inclusion of cabarets and musicals on the repertoire of institutional theatres and Christmas concerts or Mozart by candlelight are examples of this, but this has seldom been an explicit part of cultural policy. And Huitfeldt clearly states that audience development must not be at the expense of ‘the serious arts’ and that funding will not be switched to projects with wider appeal (this is also from Aftenposten’s article). The clearest change in Norwegian practice since the 1990s that can be related to audience development is the arts institutions’ increasing emphasis on marketing, a function that has gradually been introduced by most arts institutions, or at least the biggest ones. Of course, part of their job has been to contribute to (and in some cases increase) the proportion of self-generated revenues, i.e. make money, but in most cases, the marketing function is in line with a policy whose explicit aim is to democratise an already existing cultural activity. There has been particular focus recently on attracting audiences from the children and youth segments as well as people from non-Norwegian cultural backgrounds (typically second or third generation immigrants). It is important to stress that the principle of democratising culture has always been based on a specific and narrow definition of culture. In the context of cultural policy, culture is understood as something that is curated, programmed and selected by experts such as artistic directors, curators, artistic programmers, bureaucrats and politicians who have the ability to exercise cultural leader- audiences norway 2
The limiTaTions of audience developmenT ship on behalf of the rest of the population – or, more appropriately in this context, on behalf of the audience. In Norway as well as in most other European countries, it has in practice been implicit that it is a special culture that is to be democratised. In the rhetoric of Norwegian cultural policy, this is often referred to as professional art, i.e. art that is not defined as what it is, but instead entails an implicit understanding of what it does not include, namely art produced in an amateur context (i.e. not by professionally trained artists) or in an industrial context (by the profit-maximising culture industry). Among politicians in the arts field, bureaucrats, academics and the publicly-funded arts sector this is seen, with a few exceptions, as natural and unproblematic. As such, audience development is not based on an understanding that the population does not have access to culture in general, but to a specific culture: professional art. The goal of audience development is usually to reach and get more people engaged in that part of culture. So, even if audience development as a concept has a certain novelty value, it represents a goal that is in accordance with a central principle (many would perhaps say the central principle) of Norwegian cultural policy, namely the democratisation of professional art. the target groups for audience development We have established that audience development is an integral part of Norwegian cultural policy and has been so for a long time. But what audience groups does the policy want to reach? In the early 2000s, I was sales manager at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK. I had barely started before the marketing director told me that the theatre’s audience development work had produced very good results. That year, they had started putting on family productions in the Christmas period, and the result was a massive increase in sales in the ‘families with children’ segment in the prosperous suburbs around Birmingham (in other surveys, they had found that these were white families with a higher education, a family income of NOK 700,000 or more, and with Volvo or Range Rover as their car of choice). My immediate reaction was that this was not audience development, it was simply the core audience without a babysitter! My own perception of audience development was that it was about reaching beyond the ordinary audience, focusing on the groups Huitfeldt refers to, for instance youth, people from non-Norwegian (or British) backgrounds, and people with little education and low income. That was ten years ago, but I still believe there is an element of confusion as to what is actually meant by audience development. Many people see it as just a more politically correct term for marketing culture. As everyone knows, marketing originated in the commercial sector and its principles are to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs. This is based on the principle that only the products that can contribute to profits have a right to exist and that one product cannot satisfy everyone, but that all target groups must have their needs met by different products. The cultural policy researcher Nobuko Kawashima attempts to address this issue by relating cultural marketing to audience development. She argues that there are four different types of audience development: audience education, taste cultivation, extended marketing and cultural inclusion. The first three all use established marketing techniques to increase the visitor frequency of an existing audience or to reach a larger audience not unlike the audience one already has, i.e. a sales increase in an existing segment or related segments. The strategies employed vary. For audience education, it is often about offering additional services that provide increased insight into and demystify the artwork offered. This can be everything from events such as meetings with performers to catalogues, web material and videos. Taste cultivation seeks to market other art forms or genres to an existing audience – a typical example from the theatre sector is to try to promote new drama to an audience steeped in a classical repertoire. Finally, extended marketing denotes the application of a number of marketing measures targeting a similar audience to the existing one, which, in most cases, means a potential audiences norway 3
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the limitations of audience development - Arts And Audiences

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