the limitations of audience development - Arts And Audiences

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The limiTaTions of audience developmenT audience of middle class people with higher education and a relatively high income. Most people involved in cultural marketing will be able to identify with this description. Marketing budgets are limited, and the people in charge of marketing have to make strategic choices, which means it is self-evident that it makes business sense to start with the audience groups closest to hand, i.e. to either entice the core audience to come more often and try new things, or to reach out to a potential audience where the barriers to participation are relatively low. If such strategies are what we mean by audience development, then there is little to distinguish it from cultural marketing. It is the fourth dimension, cultural inclusion, that presents the big challenges. This is also the dimension Huitfeldt refers to. She believes that the increase in the spending on culture has not benefitted the groups Kawashima refers to as being culturally excluded. She is not referring to marketing, but to a type of audience development that focuses on audience groups that are hard and challenging to reach – the groups that profit-maximising marketing would ignore, but that the publicly-funded culture sector is tasked with trying to come into contact with. That is their job. The problem is that the success stories are few and far between and that the audience groups that were excluded twenty to thirty years ago are still excluded, for the most part. Thus, Huitfeldt’s observation is correct. Giving up is not an option, however. Audience development, understood as reaching new audience groups with demographic characteristics that are far removed from the core audience, and that the rest of this article will be concerned with, is often (again, according to Kawashima) based on the following assumptions: • Professional art should and can be made accessible to absolutely everyone. • What we need to do is to remove physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers. • Access to art can help to combat social exclusion. 1 This is not the first time a politician in the arts field has observed and reflected on arts institutions’ limited success in fulfilling the first assumption that professional art should reach as large and diverse an audience as possible. In their book on Norwegian cultural policy To knurrende løver (‘Two growling lions’), Hans Fredrik Dahl and Tore Helseth argue that we have experienced at least two instances of what they call ‘cultural panic’ since 1945. The first occurred in the mid-1960s, when politicians and others were very anxious about the increasing influence of the international culture industry. This led to the establishment of the Arts Council Norway, which was partly financed through a tax on weekly magazines. The second instance was in the early 1970s, when it became clear that the big allocations to the arts had not had the expected effect in the form of bigger audiences; 2 this is very similar to the concern expressed by Huitfeldt today. In the 1970s, however, the response was not audience development. Instead, attention was redirected from professional art and partly replaced by an increased focus on cultural democracy, where culture was given a much broader definition and where the cultural policy decisions were not to be made by curators, programmers and other art experts alone, but by the people themselves or their representatives. The idea of cultural democracy has now gone completely out of fashion, however, and the concept is no longer current in the cultural policy discourse. Back to Kawashima’s assumptions. Do the culture sector and politicians like Huitfeldt share the belief that professional art can reach everyone, that there are only physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers that must be torn down and, finally, that access to art can combat audiences norway 4
The limiTaTions of audience developmenT social exclusion? Of course, it is difficult to see the legitimacy of a cultural policy that largely benefits one section of the population alone, and there are few examples of a public good as redistributed as the arts. Everyone pays through tax, but the benefits are unevenly distributed for the benefit of those who already have the highest cultural and economic capital. It is natural, therefore, that players in the art sector embrace audience development – anything else would be impossible. But it goes deeper than that: the belief in the magical powers and civilising effect of art is part of a discursive practice that manifests itself in the arts sector in two ways. Firstly, in the belief in the goodness of art and the importance of everyone sharing in it. This is repeated again and again in cultural political documents such as white papers on the arts and culture, and in speeches in the Storting, in speeches given by and interviews with artists, artistic directors and politicians in the arts field. However, no one can explain exactly how an individual’s meeting with professional art can have a positive influence. In my own doctoral work, in which I looked at the rationale behind Norway’s cultural policy, I reviewed all white papers on the arts and culture since 1973, how they were received by the Storting, white papers on the ‘Cultural Rucksack’ and interviews with several politicians in the arts field, artists and directors of art institutions. It was striking to see how strongly the belief in the ability of art to facilitate personal growth (what I call Bildung, from the German Weimar tradition) is internalised in the cultural policy discourse. Allegedly, professional art can help people, especially children and young people, to achieve self-recognition and can increase their self-awareness and understanding of their surroundings, which in turn will enrich their lives and make them capable of utilising their own potential and so on. This is expressed as a self-evident truth that does not need to be further underpinned and that certainly does not need to be supported by research. A good example of how such an understanding of the influence of art on the individual and society is internalised in what I call a bildung discourse, is Yngve Slettholm, former State Secretary in the Ministry of Culture. At the opening of a national conference about the Cultural Rucksack in 2004, after making some sporadic references to how art, presented as part of the rucksack, could help pupils in their learning and acquisition of knowledge, and that it could have a positive effect on the creative economy, Slettholm proclaimed that ‘To those of us who are familiar with the value of art and culture, it is of course unnecessary to refer to research.’ This is an understanding shared by so many people that I would maintain it represents a hegemonic discourse in the Norwegian arts sector. However, as I have already mentioned, few people are able to articulate exactly how this growth and ability to achieve self-awareness arise. Instead, there is a discursive practice that is not based on what is said, but on what is left unspoken, because it is so obvious that no further explanation is needed, and this is the second way in which the belief in the magical and civilising power of art manifests itself discursively: through what is so self-evident that it does not have to be said. This discourse also rests on a shared understanding that popular culture – which has the biggest audience3 – does not have the same bildung potential as ‘professional’ art. Norway’s cultural policy thus has a strong civilising aspect that is based on this understanding that art possesses a unique potential for personal growth and education in the broadest sense. This belief that art can be made accessible to all, if only the physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers are removed, is problematic, however. It conflicts with the paradigmatic conclusion of so much sociological research since Pierre Bourdieu presented his study of cultural practices in France in the 1960s in his influential book La Distinction. Although Bourdieu’s findings and conclusions have been much criticised, his idea that the ability to appreciate art and become an active consumer of ‘professional’ art presupposes knowledge that can help to decipher the artistic message still stands. Such knowledge is most often acquired through informal socialisation in the family, in childhood/adolescence and through meeting other people who already have these audiences norway 5
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the limitations of audience development - Arts And Audiences

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