Engaging the audience vs. audience engagement with art
The conceptual separation of audience engagement from audience development and the division of audience engagement into acts involving the audience by art institutions and the audience members’ experience of actual engagement is advantageous for art practice and audience studies.
Decoding audience development
In the last twenty years, audience development undoubtedly stimulated discussions in the arts sector, cultural policy, and academia about the relationship of art institutions with their current and potential audiences. However, the lack of distinction between two similar concepts of audience development (mainly marketing oriented) and arts marketing to this day confuses cultural practitioners. Arts marketing (and marketing in general) has been considered in the cultural policy literature as the instrument of managerialism, commercialisation and corporatisation of the arts. Audience development became a phrase more acceptable for the arts sector due to the perceived lack of economic aims attributed to marketing. Its definitions embrace different areas of art institutions’ work “marketing, commissioning, programming, education, customer care and distribution” (Arts Council England, 2010, p. 3). However, audience development until now predominantly relies on marketing and the ways it is applied.
Audience development as a strategic (marketing and managerial) concept was conceived in the arts’ marketing and public relations practice in the United States in the 1950s. The phrase was used to describe the activities aiming to broaden audience groups for film and theatre. The film industry, for example, used the term while talking about building relationships between movie theatres and students via collaboration with universities at the end of the 1950s (Chamberlin, 1960). The aim of audience development to expand the base of the clients is visible in Morison and Fliehr in In Search of an Audience: How an Audience Was Found for the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre (1968). The first book describing audience development purposefully omitted artistic quality and programme selection decisions, even though authors understood their influence on attendance. Their job as public relations and audience development directors “was only to educate an audience to appreciation of [existing artistic] policy” (Morison & Fliehr, 1968). At the same time, since 1962, Alvin H. Reiss distributed an Arts Management newsletter (printed in 1970 as an Arts Management Handbook) that included audience development examples of how to attract, measure and analyse spectators. Reiss also advocated for establishing a role of an arts-and-society researcher, someone combining knowledge of fine arts and social science to influence social change (Reiss, 1970, pp. 165–167). Those actions were part of a broader phenomenon, including the birth of the American not-for-profit theatre movement outside of New York, expanding the traditional marketing methodology used by commercial Broadway theatres to build an audience for other repertoires. Two approaches to audience development within the arts sector accompanied audience development theory and actions from the beginning: first, building/expanding the audience (or market) for the arts, and second, advocating for social change.
A synthesis of academics’ positions on audience development reveals the variety of perspectives, which often blend development and engagement. Hayes recognises the audience development as “concerned with changing the structure and composition of audiences to achieve democratic participation in the arts” (Hayes, 2003, p. 1); Blackwell and Scaife underline diverse approaches to understanding and expanding the cultural sector’s user base (Lang et al., 2006, p. 61); Walmsley is seeing the role of audience development as “not only to attracting new and existing audience members, but also to enhancing their experience and interpretive capabilities” (Walmsley, 2016, p. 70); Kawashima: “as being concerned with broadening the audience base in both quantitative and qualitative terms and enriching the experience of customers” (Kawashima, 2000, p.4); Holden, Walmsley, Radbourne, Johanson, Glow & White (and many others), rather than measuring attendance to demonstrate the success or failure of the productions, recommend organisations to reflect on the depth and quality of audience engagement (Radbourne et al., 2013, p.5); and Freshwater (as many others) encourages “meaningful forms of audience participation and engagement, learning to trust audiences, giving them a sense of ownership, or the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the work’s development” (Freshwater, 2009, p. 75). Jancovich suggests considering audience development not as a promotional activity but as building demand through “collaboration and empowerment“ (Jancovich, 2015, p. 9). Diversity of understanding and blending development and engagement contributes to the confusion about the concepts. Moreover, a few academics directly tackle the challenges that arts organisations meet in their attempts to design and implement increasing attendance or engagement strategies.
Decoding audience engagement
The term audience engagement, in comparison to audience development, in principle, acknowledges the move from passivity to activity and from people treated as objects to being perceived as autonomous, sensitive, and constructing their own experiences as subjects. However, there is little agreement on what engagement is both in academia and the arts.
The art sector focuses on the operational representation of the engagement. Many arts organisations consider even a simple act of attendance and the length or frequency of attendance a satisfactory sign of audience engagement. While academics, on the contrary, suggest that “for many audience members, attending an arts event may never become an arts experience because engagement does not occur, either during an event or afterward” (Conner, 2013, p. 37). That is because, for many academics, engagement signifies some emotional or affective relationship between an audience member and an arts event and/or arts organisation (Conner, 2013, p. 2; Walmsley, 2019). This relationship can be built by providing interpretive assistance in lectures, open rehearsals, docent tours and online forums (Brown & Ratzkin, 2011, pp. 2, 18); and audiences’ active participation in meaning-making events, for example, through participation in pre- and post-event art talks (Conner, 2013). Such activities are also often treated as audience engagement actions. Those understandings indicate the role of arts institutions in the facilitation of art engagement processes. However, the audience’s encounters with at least some forms of art (e.g. dance), are affective rather than interpretative, and the lack of understanding might be unnecessary for enjoyment (Kawashima, 2000a, p. 70). Therefore, the intellectual form of meaning-making, also facilitated by arts organisations, may have a role but is not a prerequisite for the quality of engagement with art. Considering attendance and participation in art and its supporting events as engagement drives its exploration in the art sector towards quantitative considerations.
On the other hand, engagement is explored from an audience’s perspective (which is the mission of my research). It is perceived as a complex, rich and multi-dimensional phenomenon taking place on many levels: physical, social, intellectual, emotional, sensual and spiritual (Walmsley & Franks, 2011, p. 5). In the Attention Value Model developed in museum studies, engagement is assumed to be the third level of attention after captivation and focus (Bitgood, 2010). This level is considered the most difficult to attain as it involves deep processing of content and sensory, intellectual, or affective immersion (ibid.). Engagement can be understood as an active process of “audiencing” e.g. “of producing, through lived experience, of their [audiences’] own sense of their social identities and social relations, and of the pleasures that this process gave them” (Fiske, 1992, p. 353) or “the work of the spectator (…) acts of attention, of affect, of meaning-making, of memory, of community” (Reason & Lindelof, 2016, p. 17). Tepper suggests treating ‘engaging’ as a verb, whichacknowledges” that citizens actively connect to art — discovering new meanings, appropriating it for their own purposes, creatively combining different styles and genres, offering their own critique, and, importantly, making and producing art themselves” (Tepper, 2008, p. 363). Marketing scholars Calder, Isaac and Malthouse underline the experiential nature of engagement that differentiates it from involvement and loyalty (Calder, Isaac & Malthouse, 2013, p. 4). In their view, “engagement (…) arises from experiencing a product in pursuit of a larger personal goal (…) [and] reflects the qualitative experience of what consuming the product means for the person” (ibid., p. 1). Experimental psychologists studying engagement with art appreciate the dual aspects of engagement — one relating to the richness of the experience and another visible in the degree of mental processing that creates that experience (Richardson et al., 2020, p. 6). In the same direction goes O’Brien and Toms in the field of Human Computer Interaction. Building on Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow Theory and Dewey’s Philosophy of Experience the researchers define engagement as a “quality of user experience with technology that is characterised by challenge, aesthetic and sensory appeal, feedback, novelty, interactivity, perceived control and time, awareness, motivation, interest, and affect” (O’Brien & Toms, 2008, p. 960; O’Brien, 2016a, p. 1). Those understandings suggest that personal, social, artistic, and situational contexts of the experience are important factors in forming audience experience of engagement.
Facilitation of engagement
Facilitation of engagement (or engagements) may have different aims and motivations as the intentions of artists, educators, management, and marketing departments in cultural institutions do not overlap. The agreement between marketing, educational and programming departments (postulated by most audience development specialists) about who should propose and co-create experiences with the audiences to create value for all the parties concerned is rare. Nevertheless, facilitation of engagement could be done, to add to previously provided examples, by directing art experiences for deeper engagement, co-creation and participatory art, involving people in the programming, funding and production decisions, various types of dialogue e.g. social media interaction, educational and meaning-making activities, volunteering or creative partnerships with other sectors (education, health, etc.). Facilitation could support audiences’ participation and involvement in different parts of the experience strengthening the organisational relationship with (existing or newly attained) audiences. However, although still advocated, the development of long-term relationships between institutions and audiences is now more difficult due to the arts’ statistics indicating that diversity of the arts attendance, instead of loyalty, is (currently) the trend (Sharrock, 2016). One could also argue that building a relationship between institutions and audiences is another tricky and vague concept, which would be unnecessary if organisations were empathetic towards the audiences. Design of audience involvement actions benefits from a multi-layered understanding of different factors that influence people’s involvement not only during the transactional, pre-, and post-experience phases but also personal engagement during artistic endeavours (Berleant, 1991).
Audience experience of engagement
Cognitive insights strongly support the theories of active spectatorship and collapse the notion of “passive audiences” and disconnected observation (McConachie, 2008). According to neuroscience the brain of the perceiver is the real architect of the experience. The environment constantly triggers a reaction in the brain influencing physiological and bodily responses as cognition nowadays considers the body as playing a crucial role in perceptual processes (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991, 2016; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Shapiro, 2004, p. 225). Humans engage with the outer and inner world permanently. It suggests that we also continuously engage while we experience art. All mental processes, automatic and reflective, support our engagement or can lead to temporary or permanent disengagement. If we consider people as permanently mentally and bodily active, then disengagement during an art experience could mean that the engagement continues but has shifted from art to other, outer or inner, issues. Engagement, thus, relates to attention.
Audience engagement for audience development
In America, The Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation Initiative of the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund (currently part of the Wallace Foundation) since the mid-1990s has been helping art, culture, and other organisations “ in their communities to broaden, deepen, and diversify participation” (Walker et al., 1999). The phrase “to broaden, deepen, and diversify” is repeatedly used in many audience development definitions. But in the times when audience development is considered inadequate distributing that triple mission between audience development and audience engagement might offer modification of focus and conceptual clarity. The audience development phrase from its conceptualisation in the late 1950s described the activities aiming to broaden and diversify audience groups. In line with that understanding and the views of other contemporary researchers and practitioners, audience development can aim to broaden and diversify an organisational audience base through expanding the reach and actions to persuade people, market development or penetration, program or other offer diversification. Audience engagement efforts can focus on deepening audiences’ actual experiences of art. Audience development aiming for broadening the reach and diversifying audience groups can be enhanced by audience engagement concentrated on impact and raising interests in the art. Committed audience engagement (by arts organisations and the audience) is paramount for audience development if organisations intend to achieve long-term outcomes rather than a rapid (but usually short-lived) increase in tickets sales.
The conceptual separation of audience development from audience engagement and the division of audience engagement into acts involving the audience by art institutions and the audience members’ experience of actual engagement is advantageous. It could help to reduce a conceptual ambiguity of audience-related vocabulary, bring focus to art-related audience studies, and solve some of the challenges related to audiences, organisations, and artists’ relationships with each other. The separation of concepts offers the arts sector clarification of the roles of different organisational departments in audience development strategies and the facilitation of audience engagement processes in art-related (not just marketing or sales-related) parts of the whole experience. The focus on the impact of the experience of engagement may encourage artists to get involved in the facilitation of those processes in different parts of the experience without compromising their creative ambitions and the quality of the artistic creation. It also underlines audiences’ autonomy and their right to acknowledge and freely develop, or not, their art engagement processes.
The full version of the article can be read in the Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies.
Acknowledgements:
This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Benjamin Walmsley and Dr Joslin McKinney for their support for my PhD thesis.
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