Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts 9780367358884, 9780429342455

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‘A refreshing, eye-­ opening insight into gaining, growing and nurturing audiences for contemporary culture. As artists and arts organisations, too often we fall back on tempting people to attend who already know and love our artform. This study has thrown a light on a whole community that thrives on the new, the challenge, the experience of our boundary-­breaking work. Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts demonstrates if we are bold, responsive and collaborative in our engagement with our cities, we will thrive alongside that community. Everyone: every artist, every programmer, every curator, every marketing manager, every gallery assistant – and yes, every Executive Director – should read this book.’ – Seb Lovell-­Huckle, Executive Director of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, UK ‘Stretching across disciplines, arts organisations and regions, the qualitative research insights in this book offer valuable new answers to some of the most urgent questions which preoccupy arts makers and their audiences today.’ – Helen Freshwater, Reader in Theatre & Performance, Newcastle University, UK

Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts

Drawing on unique multi-­ arts, multi-­ city scholarly research, Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society. The authors critically interrogate the challenges of access, diversity, privilege and responsibility in contemporary art. Asking who benefits from, pays for and consumes the arts, the book highlights fresh, forward-­thinking audience and organisational attitudes that show the potential of live arts engagement to contribute to engaged citizenship. Complemented by comparative global analysis, the cutting-­edge insights in this book are relevant for interdisciplinary researchers across audience studies and beyond. Enhanced by a new framework for the understanding of audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management. Stephanie E. Pitts is a professor of music education at the University of Sheffield. Her research and teaching interests are in musical participation, concert audiences and music education and in the qualitative research methods used to understand people’s uses of music in their everyday lives. Sarah M. Price is an audience researcher and member of the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC). As both an academic and a freelance audience researcher, Sarah has conducted audience research projects collaboratively with numerous arts organisations, including a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Her research interests are in the value of arts engagement, understanding audience behaviour and patterns of attendance, and the role of academic research within the arts industry.

Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries Series Editor: Ruth Rentschler

This series brings together book-­length original research in cultural and creative industries from a range of perspectives. Charting developments in contemporary cultural and creative industries thinking around the world, the series aims to shape the research agenda to reflect the expanding significance of the creative sector in a globalised world. Published titles in this series include: Arts and Business Building a Common Ground for Understanding Society, 1st Edition Edited by Elena Raviola & Peter Zackariasson Performing Arts Center Management Edited by Patricia Dewey Lambert & Robyn Williams Arts and Cultural Management Sense and Sensibilities in the State of the Field Edited by Constance DeVereaux Managing Organisational Success in the Arts Edited by David Stevenson Music Business Careers Career Duality in the Creative Industries Cheryl Slay Carr Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce Tobie S. Stein Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts Stephanie E. Pitts and Sarah M. Price Access, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the US Antonio C. Cuyler For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts Stephanie E. Pitts and Sarah M. Price

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Stephanie E. Pitts and Sarah M. Price The right of Stephanie E. Pitts and Sarah M. Price to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 7, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers Chapter 7 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-35888-4 ­ ­ ­ ­ (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34245-5 ­ ­ ­ ­ (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC All illustrations by Beka Haigh bekahaytch.wordpress.com @beka_haytch

Contents

List of tables Acknowledgements Foreword 1 Introduction: who goes to the contemporary arts?

ix x xii 1

2 Understanding audiences: research methods and approaches

13

3 ‘But is it art?’: defining the contemporary arts

35

4 Cities for the arts: the importance of place in audience engagement

53

5 Art forms, venues and audience decision-making: navigating the cultural ecology

79

6 Routes to engagement in the contemporary arts

103

7 ‘It’s okay not to like it’: the appeal and frustrations of the contemporary arts

131

8 Making sense of the contemporary arts: programme notes, gallery panels and arts talk

153

9 Uncomfortable questions in contemporary arts practice and research: the formaldehyde shark in the room

179

10 Audience development and the future of the contemporary arts: learning from audiences

199

viii  Contents

Appendix A: life-history interview schedule from pilot study215 Appendix B: interview schedule from the national study216 Appendix C: national survey219 Index228

Tables

2.1 Partner organisations 20 2.2 Demographics of participants in the pilot phase (Birmingham, 2014–15)22 2.3 Demographics of participants in the national phase (2017–18) 22 3.1 Responses to the National Survey defining ‘contemporary’ 41

Acknowledgements

The three years that have gone into making this book have been a turbulent time to be British, as the Brexit referendum and two general elections have seen the country become an angrier and more divided place. In academia too, the multitude of conflicting pressures and measures have sometimes left us feeling disillusioned and therefore even more grateful for the colleagues and friends who have kept us inspired and grounded throughout the Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts (UACA) project. A research project of this scope would never have been possible without the help of our research support officer, Elizabeth Dobson; we would like to thank her for navigating impenetrable finance systems and for her inspired event planning. We would like to thank our coinvestigator, Helen Freshwater, for offering wise words and encouragement at key moments; also Jonathan Gross and Tim Rushby, for their work on the pilot, and Seb Lovell-­Huckle for taking on the national study. Thanks also to colleagues from Sheffield and farther afield: Fay Hield, Matt Jones, Amy Ryall and the many inspiring researchers we have met at conferences in Maastricht, Belgrade, Berlin, Leeds, York and above all at the first Audience Research in the Arts conference in Sheffield. Stephanie would like to thank loyal friends for providing constant support and welcome distractions: Karen, Rich, Oscar and Issy, for sharing holidays and stand-­up comedy; Susan for her distinctive theatre-­booking system, sadly not mentioned in any of the interviews; Norman, Sue and Anne, for walks enjoyed across Yorkshire and Derbyshire, with the promise of now saying yes more often; Matthew and Glossop Choral Society, for keeping me making music; and, as always, my parents for filling my childhood bookshelves and now keeping space on theirs for my own efforts. Sarah would like to thank Mom and Dad, for years of taxis to and from rehearsals; Bec and Bob, for home-­cooked meals and cups of tea; Sophie, for endless smiles and silliness; friends who were there from the start and those who have joined along the way: Sarah, Mike, Jon, Jen and Sophie; and to Seb, for coming along on this journey for the third time. We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding such an ambitious project and to Routledge for their interest in this topic and their flexible deadlines. Thanks also to Beka Haigh for the fresh perspectives

Acknowledgements xi

provided by her illustrations for the book and her visual minutes at our Open Space event. We would like to thank the many arts organisations who have been involved in this project, from the 20 official partners to the many more whose insights have shaped this research in unseen ways. Finally, we are very grateful to all the participants who gave up their time so generously to take part; their openness and honesty has made this one of the sweariest academic books we know, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

Foreword

I’m very proud to have been a member of the Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts team. In what follows, you’ll read the background, methodology and findings for what we believe to be the largest qualitative study of contemporary arts audiences in the UK to date. Stretching across disciplines, a wide range of arts organisations, and four cities, this study draws out the insights provided by 187 individual interviews and the detail of over 1.5 million words. This scope enables the offering of valuable new answers to some of the most urgent questions which preoccupy arts makers and their audiences today. As Co-Investigator on this project my role has primarily been advisory. Occasionally I’ve been up close to some of the key decisions, and in the room with representatives from the arts organisations involved. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to interview recordings and discussing the transcripts with Sarah and Stephanie. But mostly I’ve been working at a distance, offering what I hope was a useful sounding board as they negotiated the inevitable challenges that a project of this scope was bound to generate. In the book that follows, much of the time and effort involved in setting up, managing and carrying out a project on this scale will be hidden. The professional and emotional labour put into developing – and maintaining – good relationships with all the arts organisations involved will be only implicit, though it was central to the success of the project. The challenge of recruiting interviewees is in the description of the project’s methodology, but not the amount of time Sarah spent on trains between Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and London, or the days when one or more of the interviewees lined up cancelled on her. The energy and skill required to get the most out of these interviews when they did take place will also be underplayed: the balance needed between setting someone at their ease and maintaining an appropriately professional distance; the skill of responsive listening which draws out revealing detail whilst also keeping the interview on track and on time. Listening to the recordings of numerous interviews enabled by this labour brought many of these aspects of the project to the fore. On the page, you lose the texture of the context in which these exchanges took place: the clatter of coffee cups; scraping of chairs; banging doors. Similarly, it’s impossible to

Foreword

xiii

capture the specificities of each exchange here: accent, affect and tone drop away as the words lying before you invite you to concentrate upon what is said, rather than how. But listening to some of those recordings, it was easy to feel myself positioned as fascinated eavesdropper upon a meeting between strangers, noting the quality of each hesitation, laugh, and reflective pause as I attended to someone working through their artistic attachments and compulsions, their memories and sense of self. This listener also got a sense of the pleasures involved in these acts of attention and dialogue. Certainly, the interviewees’ willingness to contribute their time, experience and insights to the project serves to highlight the satisfaction involved in being asked – and of being told, as a member of the audience, that our opinions matter. The conversations which followed after the microphone was switched off also lie beyond the reach of this book, but Sarah reported that interviewees had numerous questions for her at this point. These questions reflected interviewees’ curiosity about the project as a whole, as they asked about the ultimate destination for their thoughts, and the details of their enthusiasms and frustrations with the contemporary arts. Of course, the analysis that follows scrupulously protects the anonymity of the participants, but it also engages with the complexities of their individual responses, and privileges their words. The Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts project has a life beyond and after this book: the project’s sector handbook, aimed at arts practitioners and organisations, encapsulates many of its findings in a different form, and can be found on the Sheffield Performer and Audience Centre website. Stephanie and Sarah have shared the project’s findings at conferences and symposia over its duration, including a large international conference in Sheffield in July 2019, organised as part of the project. The scholars and practitioners gathered at this event generated further questions for us all, as we contemplated the audience for audience research. How do academics effectively communicate their research insights to policy makers and the sector? How do we get our knowledge and understanding heard and acted upon? Readers of this book – members of the audience for audience research – will probably all have thoughts on the answers to these questions. But the research carried out and analysed here makes me more convinced than ever of the importance and significance of qualitative research. We need to be able to put flesh on the bones of the figures – to be able to describe lives and experiences, to cite individual testimonials and take-downs. We need to hear voices speaking – not only about impacts felt or unfelt; and meanings made or unmade – but also about experiences of inclusion or exclusion, about being an audience for some pieces of art work but not of others, about being made to feel welcome in some places and not in others. This book invites its readers to recognise the challenges of enabling this kind of listening, in order to truly grasp what is involved in understanding audiences. Helen Freshwater, Newcastle University

1 Introduction Who goes to the contemporary arts?

‘Contemporary art’ is something of a contentious term. In the clichéd response to contemporary visual art, ‘My five-­year-­old could have done that’, there are connotations of simplicity, lack of perceivable skill and a fear of being taken for a fool. The Turner Prize, an annual award for British contemporary visual art, is a flashpoint for these negative stereotypes and attracts journalistic criticism (e.g. Reynolds, 2001) for works that are perceived to be weird, experimental, pretentious and without skill. A YouGov poll (2016) of 4,099 British adults found that only 28% considered A Fun Ride to Nowhere, an artwork in Josephine Pryde’s Turner Prize 2016 Runner-­Up exhibition, to be a work of art (see also Smith, 2016). This survey additionally showed that broader, more inclusive definitions of art came from younger participants, those who were middle class, those in London and the South and those who voted to remain in the European Union. Attitudes to the arts are brokered along social divisions and reinforced by newspaper and social media choices to create both awareness and anger about the place of contemporary arts in modern society. These stereotypes around the contemporary arts have proliferated popular culture as well. In internet culture, memes mocking contemporary arts have also emerged, such as the photo of a squirrel seemingly dancing, with the words ‘People will stop asking you questions if you answer back in interpretive dance’.1 In a spoof of the old-­fashioned Ladybird children’s books, Miriam Elia produced the sell-­out We Go to the Gallery (2015), a satire of contemporary art galleries, in which a mother enjoys interpreting strange contemporary artworks, while the two children are just confused and unsettled. This story was mirrored in real life by two American teenagers who left glasses on the floor of an art gallery and then documented tourists taking photos of the ‘exhibition’, striking a chord amongst those who enjoyed seeing gallery visitors being fooled such as in this comment below a Guardian (Hunt, 2016) article about the story: ‘I wonder how many stood round, viewed them from different angles and then spouted a load of arty farty nonsense in a language only they understand.’ If there was any doubt as to whether these stereotypes persist, in the final stages of writing this book, the piece Comedian by Maurizio Cattelan consisting of a fresh banana taped to a wall caused public outrage when it sold for $120,000 (Ilchi, 2019). Mockery of contemporary theatre and dance is also found in popular culture, with American sitcoms such as How I Met Your Mother and Community including

2  Introduction

episodes in which characters take part in weird and somewhat self-­indulgent community drama and dance performances (Bays, Thomas, Kang, & Kellett, 2007; Harmon, Pomerantz, & Cackowski, 2010). In an episode of US sitcom Modern Family, the character Mitchell Pritchett is hoodwinked into attending an immersive theatre performance, which he describes as ‘the worst thing that can happen to a human during peace time’ (Levitan, Lloyd, Richman, & Walls, 2016, 0:04:50). Meanwhile, contemporary music is acknowledged as being something that even most audience members dislike, with Alex Ross (2010, 2007) lamenting the lack of cultural champions who might embrace new music in the same way that modern architecture and visual art are publicly defended. These stereotypes around the contemporary arts in the UK are part of the context for this book, prompting us to ask how audience experience challenges and is challenged by these negative tropes. How does the public discourse impact on audience members’ willingness to engage with the contemporary and shape their experience of an artwork? How is it that some people find joy in new artworks? What are the routes that take them past stereotypes to meaningful engagement, and are these routes open to everyone? Who is and who is not engaging with the contemporary arts?

1.1 What is the ‘contemporary’ and who engages with it? To explore this question of who forms the audience for the contemporary arts, we first had to grapple with what was meant by ‘contemporary’. This word was adopted for the project by default since it appears in the name of our first collaborating arts organisation, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (see Section 2.2.1), but has been problematised throughout. In the broadest sense, any art made today could be termed ‘contemporary’, but this did not seem like a meaningful definition, since it put highly commercial and popular artists in the same category as experimental and underground artists, so blurring the distinctions between the radically different funding structures, media prominence and venues that are part of the varied audience experience across recently made artworks. We therefore provisionally defined ‘contemporary’ as artworks which were both new and, in some way, innovative or challenging. This definition is, of course, highly subjective, and the personal way in which the contemporary is felt and experienced will be a running theme of this book. Indeed, while systems such as the Audience Agency’s art form coding call on arts organisations to ‘tag’ their events as contemporary, modern or other such categories within each art form, this does not necessarily map onto how the work is experienced by its audiences.2 Contemporary arts audiences are generally assumed to be small in number, well-­educated and highly engaged arts consumers. However, the available audience attendance data gives a more complex picture. Audience Agency’s (Bradley, 2017) analysis of classical music subgenres suggests that contemporary classical music averages 111 attenders per concert, which is middle of the range between orchestral concerts (average 336) and community events (average

Introduction 3

68). Their analysis points to these contemporary attenders being younger and more urban but does not suggest a particularly small audience for these events. Taking Part Survey (2016) data on dance audiences suggests that a slightly smaller proportion of the UK population attends contemporary dance (3.1% had attended in the past 12 months) than ballet (4.2%) and that contemporary dance attenders were also younger; however, Hanquinet, O’Brien, and Taylor’s (2019) analysis found contemporary dance to be less socially stratified than ballet. Furthermore, the UK bastion of contemporary art, the Tate Modern, is the country’s most visited attraction, with almost 6 million visits in 2018 (Visit England, 2019). The scarcity of audience attendance data that is broken down into contemporary and classical means it is difficult to conclude beyond observations and hunches that the contemporary arts attracts a smaller and more affluent audience, and these data often do not capture grassroots or DIY (from ‘do it yourself ’) events, leaving many smaller events undocumented. This project comes at a time of intense debate about the future of governmental arts funding in the UK and abroad. Recent policy developments have seen an increased focus on funding being used to broaden access to the arts, with the diversification of artists, arts workers and audiences being a key requirement for public funds. Furthermore, with recent initiatives such as 64 Million Artists,3 Fun Palaces,4 Creative People and Places5 and ongoing research into everyday participation6 and cultural democracy (Wilson, Gross, & Bull, 2017), the trend is very much towards work that is produced and programmed by local communities, in which diverse voices are heard and the right to creative practice is shared beyond professional artists. Attempts to open up access to the arts are to be lauded, though researchers have rightfully problematised the co-­opting of arts to achieve social policy goals (Belfiore & Bennett, 2007). However, against this changing funding climate, it is becoming harder to justify the use of funding for events which are believed to attract an affluent and niche audience and are assumed to overlook the needs of the wider population. The contemporary arts therefore act as a microcosm in which to investigate the arts sector today, raising challenging questions about the value of certain artworks over others and questioning the future direction of arts production in the UK. The contemporary arts organisations that we have collaborated with in this project (see Section 2.2.1) have often reluctantly been the ‘small fry’ in their city’s arts scene, with audience numbers, size of organisation or proportion of programming meaning that their role in the arts ecosystem is frequently overlooked, despite representing the cutting edge and, in theory, the future of each art form. Working collectively, across art forms and cities, has helped to identify the common challenges facing small arts organisations and so to articulate the contribution of contemporary arts to the provision of diverse and inclusive arts experiences. This book aims to shine a spotlight on the contemporary arts in the UK today through the eyes of its audiences. We wrestle with the difficult questions around stereotypes of the contemporary, exclusion and access and the ways in which people feel shut out of the arts. However, we also reflect on the ways in which audiences find meaning in new work, considering how they find a

4  Introduction

way to engage with it, what kinds of attitudes they take to their arts events and the value they find in work that others may see as unskilled or alienating. In considering the idea of the contemporary in multiple art forms, we explore the ways in which audiences navigate the cultural ecology of their local area, and whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘contemporary audience’.

1.2 Origins This project began as the unexpected outcome of a research seminar given in Birmingham in 2013 by Stephanie Pitts. After hearing her account of previous studies with audiences for classical music, Tim Rushby, then the marketing manager at Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), posed the challenge of understanding how audiences for contemporary music might be different. Specifically, Tim wanted to know whether there was crossover in audiences for contemporary arts: might visitors to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, just down the road from where BCMG gives its concerts, also be potential audience members? Likewise, might the audiences for the BE Festival, an international contemporary theatre programme in the city, also be attending BCMG concerts, without either organisation being aware of the intersecting cultural lives of their regular attenders? From these questions about attendance patterns came deeper provocations: did audiences seek comparable experiences of new work in multiple art forms, and could there possibly be a ‘contemporary arts audience’, a group of people who sought out the new in art regardless of form or style? Faced with these intriguing questions, the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) team conducted a pilot study in Birmingham (2014–15), supported by the University of Sheffield’s Innovation, Impact and Knowledge Exchange fund. Led by Stephanie Pitts, Tim Rushby and research associate Jonathan Gross, a group of organisations who present contemporary art in the city were brought together to discuss the most pertinent themes for their organisation. This fledgling meeting of what later became Birmingham Contemporary Arts Network (BCAN) discussed the ways in which their challenge of ‘selling’ contemporary arts to audiences was considerably different to that of organisations producing classical or mainstream events, since the general public was often taught by the media that contemporary arts were pretentious and ‘rubbish’. They had also found that audiences tended to dismiss contemporary arts after one bad experience in a way that does not happen with film, for example, where one disappointing night out is quickly superseded by other more satisfying cinema experiences. Organisations were looking to learn more about what draws people to the contemporary and what puts people off in order to grow and diversify their current audiences. The pilot study therefore focused on the following questions: •

Who is coming to the contemporary arts – and what experiences are they having of this work?

Introduction 5

• •

What value do the contemporary arts have for audiences? What strategies are contemporary arts organisations currently employing to develop relationships with audiences – and what strategies might they employ in the future?

Qualitative research methods were employed in the pilot study for a number of reasons (outlined in full in Chapter 2). From the outset, we were seeking to understand engagement in contemporary arts from the audience’s point of view, embracing the ideas of challenge and difficulty identified in the public discourse and the experience of our partner organisations but then investigating how these were overcome or even enjoyed by highly engaged attenders. Our partner organisations, selected to reflect a range of organisation size, venue use and programming, helped us to recruit 57 audience members who were interviewed about their current arts engagement and the life histories that had shaped their cultural activities and perspectives. The pilot study data generated new insights on the facilitative conditions and attitudes that encourage audiences to take risks on untried and untested works: these were reported in interim publications from the study (Gross  & Pitts, 2015, 2016) and fed back to our partner organisations in Birmingham. Inevitably, the process of analysing those rich, qualitative accounts served to further complicate Tim Rushby’s initially straightforward questions, so increasing our appetite for a national phase of research that would set our pilot study findings in a broader context through some more ambitious questions: •

Are the strong civic pride and identity expressed in Birmingham (and in Sheffield in previous studies) similar in other cities? • Are routes into contemporary arts similar across art forms? What are the expectations and experiences that audiences bring to their contemporary arts engagement? • How can arts organisations work together to implement and respond to our findings? How do the in-­depth audience views we have gathered chime with or challenge institutional perspectives? • What do we learn about arts education, arts marketing, arts consumption and arts engagement from rich, qualitative data? Following a successful funding application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a 30-­month national project titled ‘Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts’ was launched in May 2017, taking these insights and unanswered questions to three new UK cities: Bristol, Liverpool and London. The decision was taken to base the project in large metropolitan areas because the pilot study had highlighted how much the decision to attend is influenced by the amount and diversity of arts events on offer, and we were interested to explore this in additional cities to strengthen those conclusions. Exploring the experience of rural arts attenders would undoubtedly be different, and while these differences surfaced in some interviews with participants who had

6  Introduction

previously lived outside the cities where we did our research, this remains a topic for future investigation (see Kawashima, 2000). These particular three cities were chosen to offer contrast with our Birmingham findings and with previous research in Sheffield (Pitts, 2005, 2016; Pitts & Spencer, 2008): we looked for locations that were geographically distinctive from those two inland, post-­industrial cities and that offered diversity in the demographics and transience of the population. These factors were relevant to our participants’ experiences and our analysis: both Birmingham and Bristol have high levels of incoming population from London (Bristol City Council, 2019, p.  15; Jones, 2019), for example, and our participants in Bristol showed strong connections with the capital city in their arts attendance and expectations (see Section 4.3). The size of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) population was markedly different across the cities, with over 40% BAME population in Birmingham and London, 16% in Bristol and only 14% in Liverpool (Birmingham City Council, 2013, p. 15; Bristol City Council, 2019, p. 25; Liverpool City Council, 2013; Gov.uk, 2018), meaning that discussions of diversity and inclusion were often shaped by experiences of standing out in a majority white audience (see Section 9.1.2). All four cities had large student populations, but Bristol was notable for its underrepresentation of over-­65s (12.9% compared to 18.5% in England and Wales; Bristol City Council, 2019, p. 5), which could be one driver for the youth-­ oriented festival culture noted by many residents (see Section 4.1.2). We were also guided by the suitability of available partners, seeking a strong contemporary arts provider in each city to be our lead partner organisation and to provide us with a spread of art forms across the project: Spike Island in Bristol, Bluecoat in Liverpool and Bush Theatre in London. The decision to include London was a consciously problematic one: London is undoubtedly different to all other UK cities in its size, the density and diversity of its population and the extent of its arts provision. We knew that we would not be able to gain the citywide perspective that we sought in the three other sites of research but felt that understanding those differences was important to the project and that not to include London would be too obvious an omission. As the research unfolded, investigating how London was different gave a valuable framework for contrasting the provision in other cities and for highlighting the place-­specificity of audience experience (see Section 4.2). From simple beginnings, therefore, our project Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts (UACA) became a multi-­location, multi–art form investigation – to our knowledge, the largest qualitative study of contemporary arts audiences in the UK. This book is heavily rooted in the data from the study, since gathering audience perspectives in that depth and on that scale has been a rare opportunity, worthy of thorough analysis and detailed presentation in order to be of the greatest use to the kinds of organisations and audiences that we encountered. In the same way that Tim Rushby’s initially simple question led us to increasingly provocative debates, we have found that understanding audiences for the contemporary arts is a route into tackling some of the most pressing and challenging questions in culture and society today: who gets to make art, who is it for, and what is its purpose?

Introduction 7

1.3 Overview Following a detailed account of our methods in Chapter 2, this book is structured thematically into eight chapters. In Chapter  3, we begin our analysis and discussion as we began the project, by exploring definitions, boundaries and crossovers in the contemporary arts. We demonstrate the ways in which the term ‘contemporary’ is understood by different participants and explore how it is used and what it signifies in relation to the arts and their consumption. Drawing on the responses of nonattenders, which are often neglected in the research literature, we expose some of the stereotypes of different art forms and the ways that they play into risk aversion in potential audiences: the fear of being expected to join in at contemporary theatre, for example, or the sense that modern art and music are pretentious, can lead people to avoid an unfamiliar art form or dismiss it after one experience. We analyse the various contemporary arts stereotypes that are still present amongst even the most engaged attenders to draw out common themes that provoke hostile reactions in audiences and in public discourse. Having briefly introduced our research locations earlier, Chapter 4 considers the way in which cities shape and dictate audience members’ engagement. The rare opportunity to compare audience decision-­making and attendance habits in four UK cities enables our research to explore the sense of civic engagement which had emerged in our pilot study as a strong factor in supporting local arts venues (Gross & Pitts, 2016). Each of the regional cities had a sense of its own uniqueness: for Liverpool, this was founded on the legacy of the City of Culture 2008; for Bristol, a sense of ‘the Bristol experience’ of young professionals; and for Birmingham, a desire to support arts organisations’ resilience in the face of declining funding. The question ‘How is your city as a place for the arts?’ was met with detailed and sometimes defensive responses everywhere except London, where the sense of being theoretically able to do anything (but practically limited in making those choices) was stronger. Through our analysis of how people navigate the arts differently in London, we pose a challenge to audience research that assumes all attendance to be place neutral and argue for a stronger consideration of civic engagement and local pride in audience development. Additional light is shed on the importance of locality through a consideration of tourism and mobility in each city, exploring the ‘hometown’, ‘newcomer’ and ‘visitor’ mindsets and the ways in which organisations address each of those. In order that the research approaches we have taken could be applied in other cities to further understand the place-­specificity of audience experience, our two interview schedules and national survey are provided as appendices. Chapter 5 dwells on one of the unique aspects of this project – that is, the rich, qualitative descriptions of how audiences interact with multiple art forms. We explore the distinctiveness of audience decision-­making and experiences in music, dance, drama and visual arts and consider the presentational rituals that make some art forms less accessible than others, comparing the ease of dropping into a gallery with the assumption that prior knowledge is needed to enjoy a contemporary music concert. We then move on to discuss the ways in which

8  Introduction

venue shapes experience, opening up or closing off events to different types of audiences. Several of our venue-­based partners offer an accessible space to the public – a garden, cafe or bar that has its own loyal clientele who are made welcome in the venue without necessarily connecting with the art that is made or presented there (e.g. Bluecoat, Liverpool; The Albany, London). We have come to think of these as liminal social spaces, which draw people into some venues and risk keeping them away from others. We use these findings to propose a new framework for understanding how venues can enhance or detract from an arts event and the privilege at play in moments where they go unnoticed. While research with classical music audiences regularly reports concerns about how concert attendance habits are no longer being formed in schools and homes (Kolb, 2001; Johnson, 2002), in Chapter 6 we show that routes into contemporary arts appear to be more flexible and serendipitous. We will examine the open-­mindedness that brings people to contemporary arts through interest in the subject matter, support for a venue or shared interests with friends but also the limits of that open-­mindedness, which causes even the most ardently experimental audience member to ‘try anything, but not that’. The multi-­arts nature of our project means that we can explore patterns across art forms: what does ‘being a contemporary theatre person’, for example, mean to those who embrace that identity – and to those who do not? We look at how audience members characterise their own behaviour as being sociable or self-­sufficient, frequent or occasional, fully engaged or on the periphery, eclectic or specialist and consider what those behaviours and beliefs mean for the promotion of contemporary arts events. Having examined routes into contemporary arts attendance, the focus in Chapter  7 is on the experiences of attenders, and the ways in which they approach unfamiliar and sometimes challenging works and events. Whereas the idea of a ‘guaranteed good night out’ has been strong in other audience research (e.g. Pitts, 2016), contemporary arts audiences were able to find pleasure in the process of grappling with works they had not enjoyed or understood. They articulated a broader cultural responsibility to support the creation of new art and the survival of under-­funded, niche organisations, sometimes demonstrating this support through offering volunteer help and financial support. Even the most die-­hard enthusiasts had their limits, however, and were alert to perceived cynicism or inauthenticity on the part of audiences or promoters. There were also facilitative conditions that increased the likelihood of repeat, open-­minded attendance, including promotion of free events; recommendations from trusted sources; and access to backstage, ‘work in progress’ insights. A strong feature of our audience interviews was the struggle that respondents had to describe both the arts that they love and those that would habitually avoid. Their answers were heavily laden with moral and aesthetic judgements about things that they ‘should’ do as well as reflections on the difficulty of explaining their pleasure in contemporary arts to friends who do not attend. Chapter 8 draws upon our interviews and the responses to our national survey, and here we explore the language that is meaningful to a wide range of arts audience and the ways that marketing images and text speak to them (or not). Our conversations with arts marketers have also explored the challenges

Introduction 9

of describing an as yet unknown (or unmade) work in ways that will attract an audience and of supporting events and exhibitions with commentary that enhances rather than disrupts the experience. We found that conversations about contemporary arts can be part of the sense-­making for audiences, and in many ways liberating, since everyone can be assumed to be equally unfamiliar with the work and therefore able to make a personal response. This discovery offers a new way in to supporting the arts talk (Conner, 2013), audience exchange (Pitts & Gross, 2017) and post-­show discussions (Dobson & Sloboda, 2014) that have become a growing feature of arts presentation, by creating conditions in which prior knowledge is articulated but not assumed and emotional responses are valued as a form of understanding. At various stages in this project, we have encountered the challenges and criticisms that routinely face arts organisations: what is the place of the contemporary arts in society, does it make sense to support art forms that routinely reach only a small and privileged section of the population and to what (arguably limited) extent do the production of and audiences for contemporary arts reflect the diversity of today’s society? We took care to gather the views of engaged arts attenders who would not choose the contemporary as part of their cultural diet and to examine the strength of feeling expressed in antagonism to the funding of contemporary arts in the popular press. We consider where the contemporary arts sits within a climate of declining funding for large venues and for arts education and what lessons there are to be learned from the open-­mindedness of enthusiasts for the contemporary arts, who seek to be challenged rather than comforted by their encounters with live performance. In Chapter 9, we grapple with the difficult questions of inequality and quality in the contemporary arts, highlighting the privilege at work in being able to both present and engage with experimental work. Equipped with in-­depth analysis of how audiences approach (or avoid) the contemporary arts, we conclude the book with a discussion in Chapter 10 of what this insight means for artists, organisations and audiences of the future. We reflect on audience members’ resistance to being ‘developed’, with many being perfectly content with the frequency and nature of their arts engagement. We also propose that the ways in which contemporary arts audiences find their satisfaction and pleasure have valuable messages for all kinds of arts engagement: understanding that a response to live art can be uncertain, changing and personal is an attitude often lost in the presentation of established repertoire and becomes a source of frustration or alienation for new attenders. Finally, we reflect on the networks of arts organisations that have built up in our four fieldwork cities and on the benefits and challenges of collaborative working in a sector which has more to gain from sharing audiences than competing for them.

Notes 1 https://me.me/i/people-­will-­stop-­asking-­you-­questions-­if-­you-­answer-­back-­2498153 2 ‘All you need to know to complete your Artform Coding’, www.theaudienceagency.org/ resources/artform-­coding

10  Introduction 3 https://64millionartists.com/ 4 http://funpalaces.co.uk/ 5 www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk/ 6 www.everydayparticipation.org/

References Bays, C. (Creator), Thomas, C. (Creator), Kang, K. (Writer), & Kellett, G. C. (Executive story editor). (2007). Stuff [Television series episode]. In C. Thomas (Executive producer), How I met your Mother. Beverly Hills, CA: CBS Broadcasting. Belfiore, E., & Bennett, O. (2007). Determinants of impact: Towards a better understanding of encounters with the arts. Cultural Trends, 16, 225–275. doi:10.1080/09548960701479417 Birmingham City Council. (2013). 2011 census: Birmingham population and migration topic report. Retrieved from www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/file/4564/2011_census_ birmingham_population_and_migration_reportpdf Bradley, C. (2017). National classical music audiences: An analysis of audience finder box office data for classical music events 2014–2016. Retrieved from www.theaudienceagency.org/asset/1303 Bristol City Council. (2019). The population of Bristol November 2019. Retrieved from www. bristol.gov.uk/documents/20182/33904/Population+of+Bristol+November+2019. pdf/51bd3d27-­b720-­0948-­6157-­620a51a50f6a Conner, L. (2013). Audience engagement and the role of arts talk in the digital Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dobson, M. C., & Sloboda, J. (2014). Staying behind: Explorations in post-­performance musician-­audience dialogue. In K. Burland  & S. E. Pitts (Eds.), Coughing and clapping: Investigating audience experience (pp. 159–173). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Elia, M. (2015). We go to the gallery: A dung beetle learning guide. Dunging: Dung Beetle Ltd. Gov.uk. (2018). Regional ethnic diversity. Retrieved from www.ethnicity-­facts-­figures.service. gov.uk/uk-­p opulation-­by-­e thnicity/national-­a nd-­regional-­p opulations/regional­ethnic-­diversity/latest Gross, J.,  & Pitts, S. (2015). Understanding audiences for the contemporary arts. Retrieved from www.sparc.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2017/06/GrossPitts-­June-­2015-­ REPORT-­UNDERSTANDING-­AUDIENCES-­FOR-­THE-­CONTEMPORARY-­ ARTS-­1–5.pdf Gross, J.,  & Pitts, S. (2016). Audiences for the contemporary arts: Exploring varieties of participation across art forms in Birmingham, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience  & Reception Studies, 13(1), 4–23. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2013/ Issue%201/2.pdf Hanquinet, L., O’Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2019). The coming crisis of cultural engagement? Measurement, methods, and the nuances of niche activities. Cultural Trends, 2, 198–219. doi:10.1080/09548963.2019.1617941 Harmon, D. (Creator), Pomerantz, L. (Writer),  & Cackowski, L. (Story editor). (2010). Interpretive dance [Television series episode]. In G. Donovan, G. Foster, N. Goldman, D. Harmon, T. Hobert, R. Krasnoff, A. Russo, & J. Russo (Executive producers), Community. Los Angeles, CA: National Broadcasting Company. Hunt, E. (2016, May 27). Pair of glasses left on US gallery floor mistaken for art. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/us-­news/2016/may/27/pair-­of-­glasses-­left­on-­us-­gallery-­floor-­mistaken-­for-­art Ilchi, L. (2019, December 10). The $120,000 art banana gets the meme treatment. WWD. Retrieved from https://wwd.com/fashion-­news/fashion-­scoops/art-­basel-­2019-­art­banana-­memes-­1203395572/

Introduction 11 Johnson, J. (2002). Who needs classical music? Cultural choice and musical value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, T. (2019, August  8). Birmingham tops league of cities for attracting Londoners. Business Live. Retrieved from www.business-­live.co.uk/enterprise/birmingham-­tops­league-­cities-­attracting-­16716270 Kawashima, N. (2000). Beyond the division of attenders vs non-­attenders: A  study into audience development in policy and practice. Centre for cultural policy studies: University of Warwick. Research Papers, 6. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ 8905/c34d56a38b20b8ea09b8d49bf4d46285abcd.pdf?_ga=2.256192843.1532160863. 1578687181-­1736036054.1578687181 Kolb, B. M. (2001). The effect of generational change on classical music concert attendance and orchestras’ responses in the UK and US. Cultural Trends, 11(41), 1–35. doi:10.1080/ 09548960109365147 Levitan, S. (Creator), Lloyd, C. (Creator), Richman, J. (Writer),  & Walls, R. (Executive story editor). (2016). Grab It [Television series episode]. In V. Chandrasekaran, P. Corrigan, A. Gordon, A. Higginbotham, E. Ko, S. Levitan, C. Lloyd, S. Lloyd, J. Morton, J. Pollack, J. Richman, C. Tatham, B. Walsh, & D. Zuker (Executive producers). Modern family. Los Angeles, CA: American Broadcasting Company. Liverpool City Council. (2013). 2011 Census: Ethnicity and migration. Retrieved from https://liverpool.gov.uk/media/9899/ethnicity-­and-­migration.pdf Pitts, S. E. (2005). What makes an audience? Investigating the roles and experiences of listeners at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 86, 257–269. doi:10.1093/ml/gci035 Pitts, S. E. (2016). On the edge of their seats: Comparing first impressions and regular attendance in arts audiences. Psychology of Music, 44, 1175–1192. doi:10.1177/0305735615615420 Pitts, S. E., & Gross, J. (2017). ‘Audience exchange’: Cultivating peer-­to-­peer dialogue at unfamiliar arts events. Arts and the Market, 7, 65–79. doi:10.1108/AAM-­04-­2016-­0002 Pitts, S. E., & Spencer, C. P. (2008). Loyalty and longevity in audience listening: Investigating experiences of attendance at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 89, 227–238. doi:10.1093/ml/gcm084 Reynolds, N. (2001, December 10). Turner Prize won by man who turns lights off. The Telegraph. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1364860/Turner-­Prize-­ won-­by-­man-­who-­turns-­lights-­off.html Ross, A. (2007). The rest is noise: Listening to the twentieth century. London: HarperCollins. Ross, A. (2010, November 28). Why do we hate modern classical music? The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/music/2010/nov/28/alex-­ross-­modern-­classical-­music Smith, M. (2016, October 10). But is it art? According to most people, definitely not. YouGov. Retrieved from https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-­reports/2016/10/10/ it-­art-­according-­general-­public-­probably-­not Taking Part Survey. (2016). Taking part survey: Who participates? – Arts [Data tool]. Retrieved from https://public.tableau.com/profile/taking.part.survey#!/vizhome/WhoParticipates­Arts/Responsesbreakdowns Visit Britain/Rod Edward. (2019). Visitor attraction trends in England 2018: Full report. Retrieved from www.visitbritain.org/sites/default/files/vb-­corporate/annual_attractions_ survey_2018_trends_report.pdf Wilson, N., Gross, J., & Bull, A. (2017). Towards cultural democracy: Promoting cultural capabilities for everyone. Retrieved from www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/resources/reports/towards-­ cultural-­democracy-­2017-­kcl.pdf YouGov. (2016, October 5–7). YouGov survey results [Dataset]. YouGov. Retrieved from https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/wqim3twtqg/ InternalResults_161007_ArtMerge_W.pdf

2 Understanding audiences Research methods and approaches

The Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts (UACA) project took a deliberately multi-­art form, interdisciplinary approach, which aimed to bridge the artificial boundaries between audience experiences and ways of understanding them that are entrenched in both academia and the arts industry. Our own disciplinary and arts practice background is in music: we have music degrees, are active amateur classical musicians and work in a university music department. Our previous research activity has taken us into the realm of psychology of music and empirical musicology, with a focus not on musical works themselves (as would be the case for traditional musicologists) but on the ways that music is used, learned and experienced by people in their everyday lives (Clarke, Dibben,  & Pitts, 2010). Research interests in musical participation more broadly (Pitts, 2005a) led to a focus on audiences as active participants in the live musical experience (Burland & Pitts, 2014), with both of us becoming fascinated by the ways that audience members make their attendance choices and build identities and communities through their association with musical venues, genres and performers (Price, 2017). We quickly learned that while audience studies are an emerging branch of music psychology (e.g. Dobson & Sloboda, 2014; Egermann et al., 2011), and broadly accepted by musicologists as an extension of historical reception studies (Adamou, Brown, Barlow, Allocca, & d’Aquin, 2019), they occupy a more contentious position in other arts disciplines, particularly theatre (Bennett, 1997) and dance (Reason  & Reynolds, 2010). Our UACA co-investigator, Helen Freshwater, has noted that ‘theatre scholars seem to be more comfortable making strong assertions about theatre’s unique influence and impact upon audiences than gathering and assessing the evidence which might support these claims’ (Freshwater, 2009, p.  4). She highlights problems with the reliance by both academia and the theatre industry on critics’ perspectives as a proxy for audience responses, since these professional interpretations are distanced from the average theatregoer by years of reviewing experience: ‘the pleasure of watching a classic play to see how it ends is going to be a distant memory for them’ (p. 36). Even within newer traditions of immersive theatre, where audiences participate in the unfolding drama, these elements of participation are heavily controlled (p. 62), suggesting a lack of trust in the audience (see also

14  Understanding audiences

Sedgman, 2017), which Freshwater attributes to ‘the belief that performance should somehow be “good for you” and that “you” might fail to recognise or appreciate that’ (p. 55). Those researchers who have joined Freshwater in the mission to bring audience voices to the fore in theatre scholarship have often encountered academic resistance: Ben Walmsley reflects that ‘it is quite simply astonishing that empirical research of and with performing arts audiences remains both contested as a scholarly endeavour and immature as an academic field’ (Walmsley, 2019, p. 3). Caroline Heim’s (2016) book, Audience as Performer, makes a case for understanding individual rather than collective audience experiences, since ‘the cast and the audience do not form homogenous masses, but rather emerge as colourful troupes of performers made up of very different individual personalities’ (p. 21): interesting that in music, the opposite argument needs to be made, as there is novelty in viewing individual experiences through the lens of audience community (O’Sullivan, 2009; Pitts, 2005). Kirsty Sedgman’s (2018) empirical study of theatre etiquette goes a step further in analysing the often gendered and racialised rules that audience members impose upon one another. The audience participants in live theatre, and to a lesser extent dance (Glass & Stevens, 2005; Walmsley, 2016; Griffiths, Eringa, Ellwood, Walmsley, & Dun, 2015), are coming to the sustained attention of scholars at last (see also Reason, 2010), but those researchers are still having to make the case for recognising the variety and richness of theatre audience experience (see Reason & Sedgman, 2015). In gallery and museum studies, the challenges are different again: here the focus is not on audiences, of course, but ‘visitors’, with all the difficulties of capturing the fleeting and internalised responses of people who pass through an exhibition (e.g. Sifakakis, 2007; Hanquinet, 2013). The transitory audiences of festivals are similarly hard to engage in research, though there has been sufficient work in music across genres including folk (Karlsen, 2009), jazz (Burland & Pitts, 2010) and pop (Robinson, 2016) to show how unexpected arts encounters coupled with intense and positive social experiences make these events a source of the open-­minded arts engagement valued by contemporary arts audiences (see Chapter 7). If approaching audience studies from arts-­specific disciplines tends to emphasise difference, the opposite is true in arts marketing research, where there is a tendency to see generalisability in arts consumption (see O’Reilly, 2011, for an overview). Viewing arts engagement as a form of consumer behaviour can often overlook the personal and aesthetic value-­making that lies at the heart of more disciplinary-­rooted studies, though there have been attempts to bridge that divide, by devising and testing measures of audience satisfaction that prioritise judgements of quality and engagement (Radbourne, Johanson, Glow, & White, 2009). Increasingly, the silos of audience research are coming together, bringing aesthetically driven arts perspectives alongside sociological and psychological questions and setting these in the frame of arts industry and marketing applications (see recently edited collections including Radbourne, Glow, & Johanson, 2013; Reason & Lindelof, 2016). The online journal Participations has helped

Understanding audiences 15

to create a forum for such intersections, shaped by its founding editor Martin Barker, whose own work is pioneering in its capacity to speak across boundaries of live and mediatised audience experience (e.g. his work on cinema streaming of theatre and opera; Barker, 2013). The large-­scale empirical study that underpins this book and is outlined in this chapter crashes through many of the disciplinary boundaries that have previously impeded audience research. We have learnt, from our audience participants as well as our reading of existing research, that drawing artificial lines between different kinds of arts experiences is not what audiences do. Our investigations have taken instead an ‘audience eye view’, which responds to the challenge by Freshwater (2009) and others to place audiences at the heart of empirical research in the arts, and so seek to make a new contribution to the understanding of contemporary arts audiences, their motivations and engagement and their future.

2.1  Research design and methods The methods for this large-­scale research project were predominantly qualitative, concerned with eliciting narratives of lived audience experience in the contemporary arts. The opportunity afforded by our 2.5-­year funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council meant that we were able to carry out an in-­depth interview study on a scale not usually possible for either arts organisations, academic researchers or commercial audience consultancies  – and so to discover the challenges and benefits of that one-­off approach and its implications for future audience research. Interviewing on that scale, across four UK cities, multiple venues and a range of art forms, meant that familiar questions from previous audience research could be scaled up and understood in a wider context. We were keen to understand, for example, whether the civic pride that had been strong in the pilot study in Birmingham (and in previous research in Sheffield, e.g. Pitts, 2005) was replicated in distinctive ways elsewhere in the country. Researching in four cities meant that the question ‘What do you think of the arts in this city?’ prompted multiple answers, but also some clear patterns, both within each city and across common themes of gentrification and equality of access (see Chapter 4). Similarly, asking such a large sample of interviewees about their routes into arts attendance helped give context to their individual stories, so revealing, for example, the tendency for arts engagement to be re-­evaluated at points of life transition, including retirement (see Chapter 6). Audience research is often closely focused on the singularities of arts attendance: one art form (e.g. Benzecry, 2011 on opera), one venue or organisation (e.g. Sedgman, 2016 on National Theatre Wales) or one event (e.g. Karlsen,  lvdal). This is a perfectly valid approach (and one 2009 on the Festspel i Pite A which we have previously used ourselves, and no doubt will do again) but skews the research field towards understanding audience experiences in the organisational segments that make sense to promoters rather than in the holistic way that arts engagement fits with the rest of people’s lives. This project has

16  Understanding audiences

shifted the focus to the ways in which audiences navigate the arts to understand how, for example, loyalty to one venue prompts a willingness to try other art forms when they are hosted there or how openness to arts experiences can lead people to try something entirely new when they are on holiday (see Section 4.3). We have been able to consider the factors that prompt and inhibit arts attendance, including friendship networks, family commitments, geography and travel within a city and – so often mentioned – tiredness and energy as affecting capacity for the arts. Rather than assuming that audiences are always ready to be ‘developed’, therefore, we have noted the other ways in which they seek fulfilment in their lives by asking ‘Is it all about the arts?’ (see Section 6.3) and learning about the ways that audience members calibrate their arts involvement to fit with the stages and demands of their lives. The breadth and scale of the study has undoubtedly brought its challenges: undertaking over 164 hours of interviews and analysing the resulting 1.5 million words has been a monumental task. Since that is not necessarily an undertaking to be repeated in a hurry, one aspect of our analysis has been concerned with understanding how this study changes the questions that we, our partner arts organisations and potentially other academic researchers, will ask audiences in the future so that some of the richness of these findings can be extended through more sharply focused, quali-­quant methods (see Barker, 2006). We have sought also to demonstrate the particular value of qualitative research and show the complementarity of strong, personal narratives with the broader survey approaches more often available to arts organisations (discussed further in Price, Perry, Mantell, Trinder, & Pitts, 2019). Meanwhile, our in-­depth exploration of the UACA data in this book begins here, with an outlining of the methodological decisions that we made in designing the study (see Section 2.1.1), introducing our partners and participants (see Section 2.1.2) and evaluating the effectiveness of our research tools and approaches (see Section 2.1.3). 2.1.1  Methodological decisions

Research with audiences – or indeed with any human participants engaged in a real-­time, real-­world activity – presents the challenge of gathering participant views and reactions without disrupting that experience (cf. Robson & McCartan, 2016). Almost inevitably, the act of asking people about their expectations, choices and responses changes their relationship with the event: they might become more reflective or more critical, they might struggle to express their response and therefore articulate one that is easier to put into words or they might anticipate the answers that the researcher will be expecting and choose whether or not to conform with those. In an age when reviewing and rating consumer experiences is commonplace (Litvin & Hoffman, 2012), and there are increasing opportunities to respond publicly to an event through tweeting, liking and blogging on social media, arts audiences are becoming ever more fluent in critical language (Fricker, 2015). Coupled with Hennion’s (2001) observation that cultural consumers are ‘sociologised’ to the point of

Understanding audiences 17

providing their own analysis of their background and preferences, audience members who agree to be interviewed are a sophisticated cohort, capable of offering insights on the arts world that are inflected with their personal experiences, political standpoints and cultural values. The UACA project embraced the distinctive qualities of in-­depth interviews as providing a complementary perspective to those usually available to the size and type of arts organisations that we were working with: going beyond the anecdotal conversations with audience members that are often a feature of how small organisations know their market, while adding qualitative richness to the demographic consumer profiles typically gathered through box office data returns (see Price et al., 2019). In particular, we were keen to combine the understanding of booking patterns and demographics, which is a strength of box office data (e.g. Blume-­Kohout, Leonard, & Novak-­Leonard, 2015), with a focus on each audience member’s broader cultural life, to discover amongst other things what makes a regular attender at one venue feel unwelcome or uninterested in another. Qualitative approaches also suited this project because of the size and scale of the organisations involved (see Section 2.2.1 for details of partners): the nature of the contemporary arts scene meant that we were working with small organisations offering relatively infrequent, niche events, and so the audience reach was often too low for meaningful quantitative data collection. Many contemporary arts events take place in DIY venues organised by grassroots or community groups who do not typically collect data on their audiences comparable to public-­funded organisations. The sporadic and transient nature of these events therefore makes them a moving target for recruiting audience participants; our approach allowed us to uncover the powerful memories of one-­off arts experiences amongst more stable forms of cultural engagement. 2.1.2  From pilot phase to national study

There were two phases of scaling up audience research approaches within UACA: first, from one organisation (BCMG) to a citywide network in Birmingham for the pilot phase and then from one city to a national study across four UK cities for the main phase. Both of these gave opportunities to rethink what is possible in qualitative audience research and generated fresh insights on arts attendance within participants’ wider lives, which was explored through life-­history interviews in the pilot and refined into the interview schedule for the national study (see Section 2.3.1). We learned in the pilot phase that asking people about their life histories first makes for a long interview that is mainly focused on formative experiences, and while the resulting Birmingham narratives were fascinating, they left gaps in the accounts of current arts engagement that we were keen to address in the national study. In each phase we were interested in exploring participants’ views and experiences of art forms in which they were most engaged, through detailed accounts of the events and venues that had given them strong encounters with the arts, and the routes they had taken to becoming frequent participants in those audiences.

18  Understanding audiences

We also wanted to hear about the art forms in which they were least engaged, an area of audience research which is often limited by the practicalities of finding groups of people with clear opinions on things that they choose not to do. In the pilot study, we achieved this through the ‘audience exchange’ method that had proved successful in some of our earlier research (Pitts & Gross, 2017), where participants agreed to attend an unfamiliar arts event as a group, and to share their responses afterwards with each other and with the researcher. From this we learned that the process of reflecting together afterwards was felt by participants to be a valuable experience in itself and indeed was adopted by BCMG in the year following the pilot study as an ongoing part of their audience development activities. In the national phase, we included a question on least attended art forms in the interview schedule, so giving us more comparable data across cities to complement the audience exchange findings from Birmingham. We also learned, however, that group conversations about the arts are not so highly valued by all participants, so giving us new insight that challenged both our earlier thinking and other existing research on ‘arts talk’ (Conner, 2013; see Chapter 8). Another change from the pilot to the main phase was the relationship with organisations, as we moved from the Birmingham context where we had been invited to do the research by BCMG, to cities where we had no previous connections and had to build allies and partnerships to carry out the project (see Section 2.2.1). In some ways, we had a stronger case to make to potential partners in the national phase, since we had pilot study findings to report; more substantial funding, so less need to rely on goodwill and resources from the organisations; and the offer of a small budget for each city to carry out some action research of their own choosing. In each city, we had already recruited a lead partner who had supported the AHRC funding bid (see Section 1.2), but in every case, the building of a wider network of five main partners was harder than it had been in Birmingham. We had to learn to navigate existing organisational networks and then to cut across these in order to find sufficient variety of art forms, organisation size and type of event. In many ways this process replicated the journey that audience members take when they are new to a city and getting to know its varied cultural scene. We found that it was easier to build networks within art forms rather than across genres and much harder in London than in the other partner cities. Above all, we found that building these relationships takes time and patience: our longer involvement with Birmingham from the pilot study onwards bore dividends in the action research phase, by which time our partners there were tuned into the aims of the project and the shared needs of the BCAN organisations in ways that were only beginning to be replicated in Liverpool and Bristol in the final months of the project, and remained a struggle in London to the end. The Birmingham experience also demonstrated, however, that the network established in the pilot phase was not as active in the intervening two years until we returned for the national study: one of the key aims of the action research in Birmingham (see Section 10.3.1) was therefore to explore sustainability and to gauge how minimal the organisational input to shared activity could be while still maintaining a sense of connection. This fluctuation in

Understanding audiences 19

collaboration served as a strong reminder of the responsibilities of academic researchers to leave partners and participants in a position to continue and act upon research findings where relevant and to make an exit from the research field that is as carefully negotiated as the arrival (Barz & Cooley, 2008). The other difference in the main phase was an attempt to make it truly national and to reach audience members outside cities through an online, quali-­quant survey. We intended in this way to provide a broader context for the qualitative interview data and to test out some of our findings with arts attenders who would not typically seek out contemporary programming. As will be discussed later (see Section 2.2.3), we were only partially successful in these aims, as the survey was completed by fewer people than we had hoped (n = 142) and with a bias towards professional and highly engaged attenders rather than reaching a mainstream audience whose potentially more negative opinions on contemporary arts would have been valuable to the study. We gained some useful insights from the survey on responses to arts marketing images and copy (discussed in Section 8.4.1), and on routes into arts engagement (see Section 6.1.1), but on the whole, the survey reinforced our experience that face-­to-­face interviewing remains the ideal method for eliciting the personal perspectives and narratives that we were seeking.

2.2  Partners and participants 2.2.1  Recruiting organisational partners

From the initial approach from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (see Section 1.2) to the presentation of the headline findings from our sector handbook (Pitts & Price, 2019) at culmination events in our four partner cities and our home city of Sheffield, UACA has been a project thoroughly embedded in partnership working and collaborative research. It was important from the outset that our partners understood and contributed to the research questions that we were asking, and so for the national study, preparatory meetings were held in each city to which as many local contemporary arts promoters were invited as we could find through online and word-­of-­mouth searching. At each launch meeting, we outlined the findings from the Birmingham pilot phase and led a discussion around the ways in which those resonated with the local contexts in Bristol, Liverpool and London. Following those meetings, we sought five main partners in each city, aiming to recruit organisations across a diversity of venues, art forms and sizes to give us a broad base of sector knowledge and access to a wide range of audiences (see Table 2.1). Partners’ inclusion was based on whether or not they considered their own programming to be ‘contemporary’, a category which was explored and problematised in the audience research which followed. In each city, we then supported our partner organisations and the wider group of contemporary arts providers to maintain a network for discussion by hosting update meetings at the end of the first year and offering additional meetings as needed. This proved most effective in Birmingham, with

20  Understanding audiences Table 2.1 Partner organisations Birmingham

Bristol

Liverpool

London

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) Lead partner BE Festival (Birmingham European Theatre Festival) Craftspace DanceXchange Grand Union

Spike Island Lead partner

The Bluecoat Lead partner

Bush Theatre Lead partner

Colston Hall

Constellations

The Albany

In Between Time FACT Artangel Mayk Liverpool Biennial Nonclassical Watershed Unity Theatre Sadler’s Wells

whom we had the longest relationship from the pilot study onwards (2014–20), and where the emergence of the Birmingham Contemporary Arts Network (BCAN) as a strong voice in the cultural sector of the city was one of the notable legacies of the project. In Liverpool and Bristol, we were able to connect with existing networks of small contemporary arts organisations, used to collaborate over their high level of festival provision, and able to accommodate our project as part of their existing discussions. London, which proved to be different in so many ways (see Section 4.2), was the hardest place in which to initiate any meaningful networking: this became a research finding in itself, in that the different mindsets of London organisations and audiences are not often explicitly surfaced in audience research, but shed new light on assumptions made about venue loyalty and audience decision-­making (Price et al., 2019). 2.2.2  Recruiting interview participants

Our 20 national partners became our principal channel for recruiting audience members to take part in the interview study, since the diversity of their programming offered a route to reaching participants with a variety of attendance habits, arts interests and backgrounds. Organisations promoted the study via their email newsletters and social media channels, and this was followed up with in-­person recruiting at their public events, undertaken by research associates Dr Jonathan Gross in Birmingham and Dr Sarah Price for the national phase. The challenges of recruiting balanced and diverse samples for qualitative research are well known (e.g. Savage, 2015; Renert, Russell-­Mayhew,  & Arthur, 2013), and we faced particular difficulties in finding participants who were diverse in age and ethnicity and ensuring our sample was not too skewed towards those with a professional involvement in the arts. For the national phase, we used a sign-­up survey to collect demographic data that helped us select the breadth of perspectives we were seeking, by asking potential participants to complete the following questions: •

In the last 12 months, have you been to any of the following arts events? Art exhibition; Craft exhibition (not crafts market); Play/drama; Dance

Understanding audiences 21

•

• • • • •

performance; Opera; Classical/contemporary music performance; Film screening; Video or electronic art event Do any of the following describe you? I am a professional artist/arts practitioner; I work in the arts as a manager, administrator, marketer or similar; I studied an arts subject in higher education (e.g. university degree); I volunteer for an arts organisation; I am an amateur artist, actor, dancer, musician or similar; I used to be an amateur artist, actor, dancer, musician or similar; None of the above; Other What is your occupation? What is your postcode? (first half only) Which of the following age categories do you fall into? Prefer not to say; Under 16; 16–24; 25–34; 35–44; 45–54; 55–64; 65–74; 75+ How would you describe your gender? How would you describe your ethnicity?

These questions helped us to select participants who represented a range of different demographics, professions and levels of arts engagement. We were aware that audience research has had a tendency to feature participants who are predominantly white, retired, affluent and well-­educated; this is hardly surprising since that is also the demographic of most arts audiences. We quickly found that our online recruitment was attracting a very similar population, and moreover, some organisations had a very low sign-­up rate when the study was advertised on social media or through their mailing lists. In an attempt to recruit a more diverse group of participants, we adopted some additional strategies: (a) recruiting through partners who programme family events, culturally specific programming and/or free events that might reach a different audience and (b) recruiting in person at events where the audience was expected to be more diverse. We offered a £10 voucher to every participant as a token reimbursement for their time and travel costs, recognising that attending as a volunteer was a more costly activity for some of the participants we hoped to reach. The national phase recruitment also attended to diversity in its wording of demographic questions, including asking people to describe their gender rather than to select from options provided, a decision that was welcomed by arts organisations on social media. The success of these increased efforts to reach beyond the initial wave of willing participants can be seen in the change from the demographic profile of the pilot phase (Table 2.2) to the national phase (Table 2.3) and shows the benefit of the longer recruitment time, increased resources and greater attention to diversity in the main phase of the study. The sample for the national study had a lower average age (44 years) and greater ethnic variation (81% white) than is usual for audience research, including our pilot study, where the average age was 57  years and only three participants mentioned an ethnicity other than White British. We also collected data in the national phase about whether participants had been involved in arts-­related occupations and found that 14 (10%) had experience as professional arts practitioners and a further eight (6%) were

22  Understanding audiences Table 2.2 Demographics of participants in the pilot phase (Birmingham, 2014–15)

Gender (inferred from interviews) Age (asked in interviews)

Female Male 16–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65–74 75+

Number

%

33 (including 27 assumed) 20 (including 13 assumed) 5 5 2 7 12 17 5

62% 38% 9% 9% 4% 13% 23% 32% 9%

Table 2.3 Demographics of participants in the national phase (2017–18)

Gender (self-defined in sign-up sheets)

Age

Ethnicity

Female Male A lot male with elements of female Gender queer Nonbinary Queer man No response 16–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65–74 No response White British/other white backgrounds Black/Black British Mixed/multiple ethnic groups Asian/Asian British Chinese No response

Number

%

80 49 1 1 1 1 3 14 26 31 28 20 14 2 109 8 8 4 2 3

59% 36% 1% 1% 1% 1% 2% 10% 19% 23% 21% 15% 19% 2% 81% 6% 6% 3% 1% 2%

or had been arts administrators. In the pilot study, much of this data had to be inferred from the interviews, but the numbers were undoubtedly higher: 12 participants (23%) included some element of professional arts practice in their careers, and seven (13%) had experience of arts management or administration. 2.2.3  Recruiting to the national survey

Nearing the end of our data collection in October 2018, we launched an online survey that aimed to test initial findings from our audience interviews amongst the wider arts-­attending population in the UK. In particular, we were interested in the idea that even arts attenders who see themselves as open minded

Understanding audiences 23

have limits in their attendance; everyone seeks some element of guarantee within their willingness to take a risk. The survey was designed to investigate the factors driving people towards or away from contemporary arts and unfamiliar programming, as well as exploring definitions of the contemporary and the ways in which marketing images and copy shape perception of arts events. We enlisted the help of UK-­based arts organisations to publicise the survey amongst their audiences on the day of the launch. This was well received amongst industry partners, many of whom offered to post on social media channels: 68 Twitter accounts (mostly belonging to arts organisations) tweeted about the research with some also posting on Facebook and circulating it in e-­newsletters. From our own Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) account, we know that our tweets about the research garnered over 28,000 impressions, with a further 1,100 on our Facebook posts. Despite this coordinated publicity effort, engagement with the survey was low. We received 38 responses on the first day, which slowly climbed to 142 responses by the time we closed the survey at the end of January 2019. While still providing a substantial dataset for a lengthy quali-­quant survey, the relatively low completion rate perhaps highlighted a mismatch between the opinion forum of Twitter, with its 280-­character limit and fast-­moving debates, and the greater time commitment required by our survey. However, recruiting via social media helped to reach a younger sample than is often seen in academic audience research, with 36% of respondents under 35 and 18% over 65. Women comprised almost two-­ thirds of the respondents, and 85% of the sample described themselves as White British (n = 126). The survey attracted a lot of engagement from arts professionals, especially amongst younger respondents and people of colour. The survey was designed to take around 20–25 minutes to complete; the average time taken to complete the survey was 27 minutes (excluding four outliers of multiple hours). Of the 142 people who responded, 71 (50%) fully completed the survey, 16 respondents (11%) abandoned the questionnaire part of the way through, and the remaining 65 (39%) reached the end of the survey but left incomplete responses. Having studied the data, we decided that there was valuable insight in all responses, even those that were incomplete; therefore, we have not removed any of the 142 responses in their entirety from our data analysis. We have, however, excluded respondents’ answers from analysis of a particular group of questions when their responses were too incomplete. The recruitment to the survey highlighted not only the usefulness of social media for publicising research tools but also its limited effectiveness in turning this awareness into completed responses. Academic uses of social media to raise the profile of research and recruit participants are of course a relatively new approach to data collection (Bagley, 2012), and our mixed successes in this arena are echoed in recent case studies of the impact of Twitter as a research tool (Corbett  & Edwards, 2018). Using social media for recruitment gave us access to many more potential participants than we could have reached via organisational newsletters, not least since a retweet of our recruitment announcement was an easier request to make of those organisations and practitioners. The downside was that our announcement

24  Understanding audiences

was easily lost amongst the noise and pace of Twitter, placing it firmly at the opposite extreme of recruitment techniques from our face-­to-­face recruitment of interview participants. 2.2.4  Participant data: ethics, codes and quotes

In the chapters that follow, and in all related UACA publications, participants are referred to by a consistent participant code that indicates the city or mode of data collection and the interview or survey response number: • • • • •

Birmingham pilot study life-­history interviews = Bh01 – Bh56 Bristol UACA audience interviews = Br01 – Br45 Liverpool UACA audience interviews = Lv01 – Lv45 London UACA audience interviews = Ld01 – Ld45 National survey responses = NS001 – NS142

All interviews were recorded using two recording devices, to which attention was drawn at the start of each interview, and were then transcribed verbatim. Participants were sent their transcript for checking after the interview and were given two weeks to suggest any amendments. While all hesitations were documented in the transcripts to enabled nuanced textual analysis, they have been removed for ease of reading in our publications, and where editorial changes assisted clarity, these are indicated with square brackets [thus]. The research methods employed in this project were reviewed by academic colleagues and approved by the University of Sheffield ethics committee. Participants were issued with information sheets and consent forms in order to give informed consent before taking part in the project, and their personal data have been stored and processed in accordance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Those participants who indicated an interest in staying in touch with the project have been kept informed of our publications and talks, and several interviewees attended the launches of our sector handbooks in Bristol and Liverpool. Our consideration of ethics extended beyond these standard requirements to include the choices made in where to host the interviews, which were typically in independent cafes chosen by the participants, many of whom shared our desire to avoid corporate chains in favour of supporting local businesses (see Section 5.3). Similarly, in offering £10 vouchers in recognition of participants’ time and travel costs, we used the multi-­retailer One4All company, rather than Amazon, to allow our interviewees to make their own ethical choices about where to spend them. Several participants declined the offer of any reimbursement, and in those cases we donated the vouchers to a homeless support charity in Sheffield.

2.3  Design and evaluation of research tools The research tools designed for the UACA project were informed by our previous research with audiences (e.g. Pitts, 2014; Price, 2017) and by the research

Understanding audiences 25

question that was posed by the lead partner in the pilot study and refined into broader questions for the national phase (see Section 1.2). At every stage of the project, we took a cross-­cutting approach, reaching beyond affiliation to one organisation or interest in one art form to include consideration of the formative and transformative experiences that had generated current levels of arts participation and to situate these experiences in the locality and life stage of each participant. These aims were achieved through a range of data collection tools, which are outlined and evaluated in the following sections. 2.3.1  Designing and refining our interview approach

From the outset, in-­depth qualitative interviewing was the mainstay of the project, chosen for its appropriateness to the personal, holistic accounts of arts attendance that we were seeking and for its distinctiveness for small arts organisations, who are typically keen to know their audiences’ perspectives in greater depth but lack the funding and staffing capacity to carry out this kind of research. Our interviews were wide ranging but focused, semi-­structured and flexible: in the pilot stage, a life-­history approach placed the emphasis on the routes into arts attendance (see interview schedule, Appendix A), and in the national study, this was honed into a three-­part interview that covered the areas of current arts engagement, the arts in the relevant city and routes to engagement (see Appendix B). The interviews were carried out by one researcher in each of the two phases: Dr Jonathan Gross in Birmingham and Dr Sarah Price in Liverpool, London and Bristol. Both were experienced qualitative researchers, skilled in asking the necessary follow-­up questions to elicit individual narratives and in putting participants at ease to encourage honest and personal responses. Following the completion of interviews, the recordings were transcribed in full (using a mix of in-­house and agency staff), and the transcripts were read repeatedly by the research team throughout the analysis (see Section 2.4). For the Birmingham pilot study, organisational interviews were also undertaken with the directors of the five arts organisations with whose audiences we had conducted fieldwork. These conversations aimed to explore with senior figures, in strategic roles within their organisations, the ways in which they currently work with their audiences and what challenges the organisation faces in working with audiences in the future. This was informative in the design of the national study and gave us the insights necessary to set up the networking partnerships in each city with due sensitivity to the concerns of arts managers and administrators. In the national phase, informal conversations and regular networking meetings replaced the organisational interviews, since we had the opportunity to build relationships and gather opinions and ideas over a longer period of time. The interview schedule remained consistent throughout the 135 national phase interviews, and the questions worked well for covering the topics that would address our research aims. A few later questions in the interview were sometimes omitted due to lack of time or because they had been answered spontaneously earlier in the discussion. The only deliberate alteration over the year of fieldwork was in the gradual abandonment of a sheet of logos that had

26  Understanding audiences

accompanied a question intended to gauge participants’ knowledge of the arts organisations in their city (see Q9 in Appendix B). This was sometimes problematic in being viewed by participants as a test of their local arts awareness and, in London especially, the list of organisations that we had compiled was rarely matched to those that participants knew and frequented, leading to distracting rather than productive discussions. Overall, the interviews were highly effective in eliciting the rich, qualitative data that we had hoped for and also in building relationships with arts audiences in their localities that generated useful insights to report back to arts organisations. We found that our partner networks had a high level of trust in the data that we presented in the sector handbook (Pitts & Price, 2019) and at our project close meetings, highlighting in their feedback examples of findings that resonated with their audience development struggles: for example, ‘volunteering and participation as routes to attendance. I think we know this but could prioritise and support this route more’ and ‘valuable to have access to evidence to form initiatives and shape arguments to get our venue to be more inclusive’. 2.3.2  The value of being there: observation and audience exchange

Our gradual shift towards face-­to-­face recruitment intensified the ethnographic elements of the study, as participants and the researcher met at arts events and sometimes discussed those in the interview that followed. An element of participant observation was built in from the pilot phase onwards, as Jonathan Gross and Stephanie Pitts visited arts organisations in Birmingham, including the Digbeth First Friday open gallery events that were subsequently mentioned by many participants. Knowing the venues, events and areas of the city that participants were referring to helped to build trust and made the interviews more fluent, as explanations could move quickly beyond the descriptively factual to a more personal response (cf. Walmsley, 2018). We also came to know our partner cities and to navigate their arts ecologies in the same ways as local participants, gaining first-­hand experience of the location of venues and sense of visiting them as a newcomer, albeit one with a particular role. In the pilot study, we used the additional method of ‘audience exchange’, devised in previous research (Pitts, 2016; Pitts & Gross, 2017) as a way of accessing nonattender experience. In an audience exchange, audience members who are highly engaged in one art form are taken to an event with which they are less familiar and asked to reflect on their expectations and experiences of that event: in Birmingham, this included visits to the Ikon Gallery, a DanceXchange performance, an Eastside Projects exhibition, and a BCMG family concert, each of which were first-­time experiences for the participants who attended. A group conversation followed, in which the researcher facilitated the discussion, but the participants quickly became fully engaged in exchanging opinions and reflections with one another. In feedback on the experience, several commented that the opportunity to articulate their emergent responses

Understanding audiences 27

to a new art form with other inexperienced attenders was a valuable form of audience development in itself (Pitts & Gross, 2017, p. 76). Certainly the audience exchange method generated insights for the research on how new attenders search for meaning in unfamiliar arts by relating them to their prior cultural experiences and how this process can be enhanced by helpful, flexible commentary provided by trusted sources (see Chapter 8). Audience exchange was not continued into the national study, however, partly due to the practicalities of organising this at a distance in multiple cities, but mainly because we were able to access the nonattender perspectives that we were seeking through this method in other ways. The systematic coverage of all art forms in the interviews meant that we heard about first-­time attendance experiences and reasons for avoiding some art forms from each participant, without needing to engineer this through an audience exchange. 2.3.3  Seeking an overview: the national survey

The national survey, as already outlined (see Section 2.2.3), was intended to provide a quantitative context to our in-­depth qualitative approach, by eliciting the views of arts attenders across the UK whose affiliation to the contemporary arts might be less strong than those interviewees who were recruited through our partner organisations. While the survey was only partly successful in achieving these aims due to relatively low recruitment, it did generate a useful sample of responses to arts marketing copy and images (see Chapter 8). It also tested some of our interview findings on perceptions of venues and cities by asking questions about the arts provision in respondents’ localities and about the qualities of the venues they were most likely to attend. It generated some strong views on arts preferences, in response to questions on art forms that respondents were most and least likely to attend, and revealed some new insights on routes into arts attendance in childhood and in later life (see Appendix C for full survey design). The survey used a ‘quali-­quant’ approach (Barker, 2006; Sedgman, 2019a) with a mix of multiple-­choice questions, ratings scales and short-­answer qualitative questions. Knowing from our interviews that audience members like to talk about the distinctiveness of their experiences, rather than their uniformity, we aimed to make space within the relative brevity of a survey for participants to articulate nuanced views that were nevertheless comparable across the sample. The survey was successful in achieving these more concise, but still individual responses, and from the arts professionals who responded, we gained a clear sense that we were gaining perspectives consistent with those elicited through our other methods. Some comparison of the views of ‘contemporary’ and ‘mainstream’ arts audiences was possible from the results, since we asked participants to self-­define their arts preferences and so could group them by level of experience, engagement and liking for contemporary arts. However, as noted, we were only partially successful in recruiting the ‘non-contemporary’

28  Understanding audiences

audiences that we had hoped to reach, and so this remains an area needing further investigation in follow-­up studies. 2.3.4  Testing the findings: action research

A distinctive feature of our national phase was the inclusion of an action research project, designed in each city by the lead partner organisations and supported through a small budget and some evaluation activity by the research team. Action research, defined as an iterative research process that focuses on practical problem-­solving in a specific context (Willis & Edwards, 2014, p. 27), is an approach used widely in education to foreground practitioner-­led investigations (Finney & Laurence, 2013) and also in marketing as a framework for understanding customer or client perspectives (Perry  & Gummesson, 2004). For arts organisations, it is a method closest to the ongoing adjustment of marketing and related decisions that is undertaken by any organisation in response to sales figures and informal evaluation: the difference here is that a group of our partners in each city worked together to define a change based on our research findings and to deliver that change across their network of organisations. The decision to include an element of research that was designed and led by the partners was in keeping with the collaborative nature of the UACA project and consistent with the impact and knowledge exchange agenda of publicly funded academic research. The difficulties of aligning academic timescales, priorities and methods with those of arts organisations have been powerfully documented by other audience researchers (Sedgman, 2019b; Behr, 2017) and theorised as ‘knowledge resistance’ by scholars fearful that the instrumental gains of research will come to be valued more highly than rigorous methods and academic expertise (Williamson, Cloonan, & Frith, 2011). These tensions have certainly been present in our research, but the action research component was a deliberate, circumscribed way of handing over the control of agendas and working methods to the partner organisations and waiting to see what happens when ‘knowledge exchange’ genuinely operates in both directions (Price, 2015). In practice, our partners in each city responded differently to the invitation to carry out an action research project (see Section 10.3.1): the relationships established through the Birmingham Contemporary Arts Network (BCAN) made these organisations very pragmatic in their approaches, and they worked closely together to establish the joint-­ticketing initiative, Culture Feast, and then to review its effectiveness and sustainability, thinking carefully about the minimum contribution needed from each organisation to generate the benefits of cross-­marketing of contemporary arts events (Pitts  & Price, 2019, pp. 14–15). Partners in other cities highlighted different key findings from our research, so in itself providing a valuable moment of feedback for us on which had been the significant messages for them: Liverpool focused on the liminal spaces of cafes and gardens (see Section 5.2) and aimed to reach new audiences through food-­based events and marketing, London tackled the question of how to write good marketing text for contemporary arts events through a copywriting workshop and some A/B testing of different descriptions of events (see

Understanding audiences 29

Chapter 8) and Bristol worked to tackle some of the inequalities of arts access through forming a cultural ambassadors panel from disadvantaged areas of the city (see Section 9.1). At the time of writing, the action research was ongoing in all but Birmingham, and so the results of these studies will be investigated more thoroughly in future publications.

2.4  Approaches to analysis Given the huge volume of qualitative data collected for this project, analysis has been a slow and painstaking process, taking two researchers a year of full-­ time work (followed by some more stressful months of continued part-­time effort alongside other responsibilities!). Having two perspectives on the interview data proved invaluable, particularly for cross-­referencing the recollections of the interviews carried out by Sarah Price, with fresh reading by Stephanie Pitts: these two different research positions, born of necessity, became a virtue in giving us a starting point for interrogating alternative interpretations of the similarities and differences between participants, art forms and cities. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to frame our thorough coding of the data, paying attention to what was said and what was not said as we sought to understand how participants made sense of and found meaning in their reported lived experiences (Smith & Osborn, 2003; Smith, 2019). Drawing also on discourse analysis approaches (Coyle, 2007), we took note of how participants presented themselves in the interviews, noting the moments of reflection, realisation, contradiction and self-­censorship. We combined coding by hand with the use of NVivo software, selecting the most appropriate tool for detailed analysis of themes derived from the data, which were repeatedly revisited throughout our year of analysis and writing. Data from the pilot study, which had been collected using a different interview schedule, (see Section 2.3.1) features selectively, making strong contributions to our comparisons of cities and art forms, but having less to say about inequalities in the arts due to the greater homogeneity of the Birmingham sample. Contradictions between cities have been treated with caution, as for example, when we noted the stronger focus on ethnicity and inclusion in London and Bristol but found fewer references to this in the Liverpool data, where the mainly White participants were more concerned with historical and current class divides. Throughout this analysis, as in previous work (Price, 2017), we have embraced both patterns and idiosyncrasies amongst our participants’ accounts of the arts, seeking common mechanisms that influence arts engagement amongst the diversity of experiences being described. The quantitative data gathered through the national survey and from the demographics collected in the participant sign-­up sheets have been brought into our analysis at key points to provide context for the individual narratives of the interviews. We have also derived descriptive statistics, where appropriate, from our qualitative data, where it was helpful to note the distribution of responses by age, gender or other factors or the prevalence of particular kinds of arts or life experience.

30  Understanding audiences

The chapters of this book highlight the main themes of our analysis, which captured the multiple lenses of the project, including location and context (cities and venues), audience motivation (routes to the arts and past experiences), audience engagement (arts talk and participation), inclusion and exclusion and cultural value (the place of arts in people’s lives). Over the course of this book, we consider what it is that distinguishes contemporary arts attenders from audiences for classical, mainstream or traditional works, highlighting differences in attitude, access and motivation to engage as key factors in priming for engagement in new and experimental works.

2.5  Conclusions: the case for holistic audience research The methods developed through the UACA project have affirmed to us and our partner organisations the extraordinary power of in-­ depth, qualitative research for understanding audience experiences beyond the confines of venues and art forms. The ‘audience eye view’ that has become the hallmark of this project highlights the ways in which audience engagement is shaped by the opportunities and ethos of the local cultural ecology as well as the life stage and cultural priorities of each participant. We therefore make the case for place-­specific, holistic approaches in audience research to complement the more targeted investigations that are more often by necessity the concern of arts organisations and academic researchers. Despite the breadth and scale of our UACA interviews, we know that qualitative research does not satisfy everyone: a reviewer of one of our earlier articles criticised the inclusion of ‘only’ 135 interviews in our national phase and suggested that our findings would only be valid if tested quantitatively on a much larger sample. The large-­scale survey is of course a valid approach and one that is prevalent in the market research and box office analysis of many large arts organisations, but it would not have been applicable or possible for the smaller, niche arts providers with whom we were working. More importantly, the resulting generalised findings would have been no more objective than the nuanced, individual accounts that we prioritised in our research: putting a number on an opinion through a rating scale might be a quicker response, but it misses the complicating factors and explanations that were often revealed in our interviews. Qualitative research is often misunderstood as being too easy, too subjective and too instinctive. Certainly, engaging with people and their complex, messy ideas in an interview is the research method closest to the conversations of daily life, and yet the rigour of question design and analysis takes this form of discourse beyond the everyday. Audience research will continue to need multiple approaches and an openness to exploring the connections between them (Price et al., 2019; Sedgman, 2019a). In our understanding of audiences for the contemporary arts, we have come to celebrate the ways in which the complexities of arts experiences are revealed in the hesitant, passionate thoughts of our varied participants and have aimed to represent these faithfully but critically in the analysis and discussions that follow here.

Understanding audiences 31

References Adamou, A., Brown, S., Barlow, H., Allocca, C., & d’Aquin, M. (2019). Crowdsourcing linked data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 20, 61–79. doi:10.1007/s00799-­018-­0235-­0 Bagley, C. A. (2012). Chapter 6: Embracing Twitter as a research tool. In G. Widén & K. Holmberg (Eds.), Social information research (Library and Information Science, Volume 5) [E-­reader version] (pp. 131–147). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi:10.1108/S1876­0562(2012)0000005008 Barker, M. (2006). I have seen the future and it is not here yet . . .; Or, on being ambitious for audience research. The Communication Review, 9, 123–141. doi:10.1080/10714420600663310 Barker, M. (2013). Live at cinema near you: How audiences respond to digital streaming of the arts. In J. Radbourne, H. Glow, & K. Johanson (Eds.), The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts (pp. 15–34). Bristol: Intellect. Barz, G. F., & Cooley, T. J. (Eds.). (2008). Shadows in the field: New perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press. Behr, A. (2017). Where the snowman meets the sunshine: The tensions between research, engagement and impact in cultural policy. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 14(1), 352–375. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2014/Issue%201/21.pdf Bennett, S. (1997). Theatre audiences: A theory of production and reception (2nd ed.). Oxford, USA and Canada: Routledge. Benzecry, C. E. (2011). The opera fanatic: Ethnography of an obsession. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Blume-­Kohout, M. E., Leonard, S. R.,  & Novak-­Leonard, J. L. (2015). When going gets tough: Barriers and motivations affecting arts attendance. Retrieved from www.arts.gov/sites/ default/files/when-­going-­gets-­tough-­revised2.pdf Burland, K., & Pitts, S. E. (2010). Understanding jazz audiences: Listening and learning at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. Journal of New Music Research, 39, 125–134. doi:10. 1080/09298215.2010.493613 Burland, K., & Pitts, S. E. (Eds.). (2014). Coughing and clapping: Investigating audience experience. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing. Clarke, E., Dibben, N., & Pitts, S. (2010). Music and mind in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press. Conner, L. (2013). Audience engagement and the role of arts talk in the digital era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Corbett, B., & Edwards, A. (2018). A case study of Twitter as a research tool. Sports in Society, 21, 394–412. doi:10.1080/17430437.2017.1342622 Coyle, A. (2007). Discourse analysis. In E. Lyons & A. Coyle (Eds.), Analysing qualitative data in psychology (pp. 98–116). London: Sage. Dobson, M. C., & Sloboda, J. (2014). Staying behind: Explorations in post-­performance musician-­audience dialogue. In K. Burland  & S. E. Pitts (Eds.), Coughing and clapping: Investigating audience experience (pp. 159–173). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Egermann, H., Sutherland, M. E., Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., & Altenmüller, E. (2011). Does music listening in a social context alter experience? A physiological and psychological perspective on emotion. Musicae Scientiae, 15, 307–323. doi:10.1177/1029864911399497 Finney, J., & Laurence, F. (2013). Masterclass in music education: Transforming teaching and learning. London: Continuum. Freshwater, H. (2009). Theatre and audience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fricker, K. (2015). The futures of theatre criticism. Canadian Theatre Review, 163, 49–53. doi:10.3138/ctr.163.010

32  Understanding audiences Glass, R., & Stevens, C. (2005). Making sense of contemporary dance: An Australian investigation into audience interpretation and enjoyment levels. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.553.9501&rep=rep1&type=pdf Griffiths, L., Eringa, W., Ellwood, N., Walmsley, B., & Dunn, A. (2015). Yorkshire dance: Online engagement platform. Retrieved from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20161104003001uo_/http://artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2013/10/ Yorkshire-­Dance-­Final-­Project-­Report.pdf Hanquinet, L. (2013). Visitors to modern and contemporary art museums: Towards a new sociology of ‘cultural profiles’. The Sociological Review, 61, 790–813. doi:10.1111/ 1467–954X.12072 Heim, C. (2016). Audience as performer: The changing role of theatre audiences in the twenty-­first century. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Hennion, A. (2001). Music lovers: Taste as performance. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(5), 1–22. doi:10.1177/02632760122051940 Karlsen, S. (2009). Learning through music festivals. International Journal of Community Music, 2, 129–141. doi:10.1386/ijcm.2.2-­3.129_1 Litvin, S. W., & Hoffman, L. M. (2012). Responses to consumer-­generated media in the hospitality marketplace: An empirical study. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 18, 135–145. doi:10.1177/1356766712443467 O’Reilly, D. (2011). Mapping the arts marketing literature. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 1, 26–38. doi:10.1108/20442081111129851 O’Sullivan, T. (2009). All together now: A symphony orchestra audience as a consuming community. Consumption Markets & Culture, 12, 209–223. doi:10.1080/10253860903063220 Perry, C., & Gummesson, E. (2004). Action research in marketing. European Journal of Marketing, 38, 310–320. doi:10.1108/03090560410518567 Pitts, S. E. (2005a). Valuing musical participation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pitts, S. E. (2005b). What makes an audience? Investigating the roles and experiences of listeners at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 86, 257–269. doi:10.1093/ml/gci035 Pitts, S. E. (2014). Musical, social and moral dilemmas: Investigating audience motivations to attend concerts. In K. Burland & S. E. Pitts (Eds.), Coughing and clapping: Investigating audience experience (pp. 21–33). Farnham: Ashgate. Pitts, S. E. (2016). On the edge of their seats: Comparing first impressions and regular attendance in arts audiences. Psychology of Music, 44, 1175–1192. doi:10.1177/0305735615615420 Pitts, S. E., & Gross, J. (2017). ‘Audience exchange’: Cultivating peer-­to-­peer dialogue at unfamiliar arts events. Arts and the Market, 7, 65–79. doi:10.1108/AAM-­04-­2016-­0002 Pitts, S. E., & Price, S. M. (2019). Understanding audiences for the contemporary arts. Retrieved from www.sparc.dept.shef.ac.uk/uaca/handbook/ Price, S. M. (2015). Academic and commercial research: Bridging the gap. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 12(2), 168–173. Retrieved from www.participations. org/Volume%2012/Issue%202/9.pdf Price, S. M. (2017). Risk and reward in classical music concert attendance: Investigating the engagement of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ audiences with a regional symphony orchestra in the UK (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16628/ Price, S., Perry, R., Mantell, O., Trinder, J., & Pitts, S. (2019). Spontaneity and planning in arts attendance: Insights from qualitative interviews and the audience finder database. Cultural Trends, 28(2–3), 220–238. doi:10.1080/09548963.2019.1617943 Radbourne, J., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (Eds.). (2013). The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts. Bristol: Intellect. Radbourne, J., Johanson, K., Glow, H., & White, T. (2009). The audience experience: Measuring quality in the performing arts. International Journal of Arts Management, 11(3), 16–29.

Understanding audiences 33 Reason, M. (2010). The young audience: Exploring and enhancing children’s experiences of theatre. Stoke-­on-­Trent: Trentham Books Limited. Reason, M.,  & Lindelof, A. M. (Eds.). (2016). Experiencing liveness in contemporary performance: Interdisciplinary perspectives. New York: Routledge. Reason, M., & Reynolds, D. (2010). Kinesthesia, empathy, and related pleasures: An inquiry into audience experiences of watching dance. Dance Research Journal, 42(2), 49–75. Reason, M., & Sedgman, K. (2015). Editors’ introduction: Themed section on theatre audiences. Participations: Journal of Audience  & Reception Studies, 12(1), 117–122. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2012/Issue%201/8.pdf Renert, H., Russell-­Mayhew, S., & Arthur, N. (2013). Recruiting ethnically diverse participants into qualitative health research: Lessons learned. The Qualitative Report, 18(23), 1–13. Robinson, R. (2016). Music festivals and the politics of participation. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Robson, C., & McCartan, K. (2016). Real world research: A resource for users of social research methods in applied settings (4th ed.). Chichester: Wiley & Sons. Savage, M. (2015). Social class in the 21st century. London: Pelican Books. Sedgman, K. (2016). Locating the audience: How people found value in national theatre wales. Bristol: Intellect. Sedgman, K. (2017). Ladies and gentlemen follow me, please put on your beards: Risk, rules, and audience reception in national theatre wales. Contemporary Theatre Review, 27, 158–176. doi:10.1080/10486801.2017.1300153 Sedgman, K. (2018). The reasonable audience: Theatre etiquette, behaviour policing, and the live performance experience. Cham: Palgrave Pivot. Sedgman, K. (2019a). Challenges of cultural industry knowledge exchange in live performance audience research. Cultural Trends, 28, 103–117. doi:10.1080/09548963.2019.1617930 Sedgman, K. (2019b). On rigour in theatre audience research. Contemporary Theatre Review, 29, 462–479. doi:10.1080/10486801.2019.1657424 Sifakakis, S. (2007). Contemporary art’s audiences: Specialist accreditation and the myth of inclusion. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, 203–223. doi:10.1177/1367549407075908 Smith, J. A. (2019). Participants and researchers searching for meaning: Conceptual developments for interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 16, 161–181. doi:10.1080/14780887.2018.1540648 Smith, J. A., & Osborn, M. (2003). Interpretative phenomenological analysis. In J. A. Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (3rd ed., pp. 25–52). London: Sage. Walmsley, B. (2016). From arts marketing to audience enrichment: How digital engagement can deepen and democratize artistic exchange with audiences. Poetics, 58, 66–78. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.07.001 Walmsley, B. (2018). Deep hanging out in the arts: An anthropological approach to capturing cultural value. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 24, 272–291. doi:10.1080/1028 6632.2016.1153081 Walmsley, B. (2019). Audience engagement in the performing arts: A critical analysis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Williamson, J., Cloonan, M., & Frith, S. (2011). Having an impact? Academics, the music industries and the problem of knowledge. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 17, 459–474. doi:10.1080/10286632.2010.550682 Willis, J. W.,  & Edwards, C. (2014). Theoretical foundations for the practice of action research. In J. W. Willis & C. Edwards (Eds.), Action research: Models, methods, and examples (pp. 21–43). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

3 ‘But is it art?’ Defining the contemporary arts

‘So what do you mean by “contemporary”?’

We have been asked this question countless times over the course of the project, but the term defies easy definition, and many books (Meyer, 2013), articles (Kwan, 2017) and blogs (Sierz, 2008) grapple with the task. These texts often begin by acknowledging the common use of the term in the English language, noting that it means ‘of the time’ and tends to be used synonymously with ‘modern’ to mean recent or current. Authors often then continue by explaining the way in which modern and contemporary are distinctive terms within the arts world (e.g. Chilvers  & Glaves-­Smith, 2015), modern and its derivative ‘modernism’ belonging to the early twentieth century (Cottingham, 2005), and contemporary being a movement which occurred afterwards, both fuelling and challenging globalised mass culture (Stallabrass, 2004). However, these distinctions do little to resolve the ‘slipperiness’ (Blocker, 2015) of ‘the contemporary’, since stylistic diversity and global changes have rendered the search for a common trope or ideology in contemporary art impossible (Foster et al., 2009). Some claim that defining ‘the contemporary’ is not a new challenge. Meyer (2013) suggests that art eras have always been distinguished retrospectively, and that there is not enough critical distance between the writer and the art to be able to identify a unifying stylistic trend while artists are still alive and producing work. In a monograph ominously titled After the End of Art, Danto (1997) proposes that every other historical era has rebelled against the one before and its opposition to inherited aesthetic values creating a unified style or ‘ism’. The challenge of defining ‘the contemporary’ could therefore be seen as a lack of central rebellious force against historical precedents. The question of defining ‘the contemporary’ does not have the same urgency in every art form. By far the greatest amount written about the contemporary is within visual art criticism and theory. An amalgamated definition of ‘contemporary visual art’ may be art made since around 1970, with stylistic diversity and lack of unifying ‘isms’ (Little, 2004), drawing freely on art traditions from throughout history and across global cultures and often rooted in

36  ‘But is it art?’

socio-­political issues of the day (Esaak, 2019; Silka, 2016; Smith, 2009, 2010). Many of the definitions point to the fact that art institutions such as museums and art galleries often contain the word ‘contemporary’ in their name; therefore, the question of what is included and excluded from that category is played out on a public stage. Definitions of ‘contemporary dance’ are similarly public, since that is a term used in educational contexts (e.g. the Northern School of Contemporary Dance) and to describe the work of dance companies (e.g. Rambert’s website is titled ‘Rambert Contemporary Dance Company London’). Discussions of what ‘contemporary dance’ might mean are found more in public-­facing blogs and videos than in academic texts (Bedinghaus, 2019; n.a., 2017; The Place, 2015). In contrast to Danto’s (1997) definition, contemporary dance perhaps does have a sense of unity in its rejection of dance that had come before. Shaaron Boughen (2014) traces the origins of contemporary dance to a desire to take the freedom of expression and abstraction of modern dance but to reinforce the need for training and for malleable dancing bodies, who could take on movement from any number of global dance traditions, in contrast to the pedestrian movements which had become a key aesthetic in modern dance. SanSan Kwan (2017) offers a useful distinction between ‘contemporary’ as a generic category and as a specific school of dance, delineating three types of ‘contemporary dance’. Contemporary concert dance consciously builds on modern/post-­modern roots, combines many styles, has an artistic imperative and a ‘bodies for hire’ philosophy in which dancers are expected to adapt to any movement style. Contemporary commercial dance, on the other hand, does not have the same political or aesthetic motivations as concert dance, even if some of the language is the same, and tends to be rooted in heteronormative and virtuosic expression of lyrics of popular songs. Finally, in contemporary world dance, ‘contemporary’ is used as a qualifier to indicate that the dance is not traditional, with its use demonstrating the Western-­centric definitions of ‘contemporary’ in dance. Similarly, while contemporary music can have a variety of interpretations, the phrase ‘contemporary art music’ or the oxymoronic ‘contemporary classical music’ offers a useful distinction from commercial or popular music styles. That being said, this distinction is not always so easy to identify in practice; perhaps stemming from the blurring of boundaries between art and popular music from the 1960s onwards (Huyssen, 1986), artists such as Ludovico Einaudi and Anna Meredith sit somewhere between these two camps, and cross-­ media art such as digital sound installations means that audiences might hear contemporary music without ever labelling it as such. Some of the definitions of contemporary art and dance are echoed in attempts to define contemporary art music as emerging somewhere post-­1945, with stylistic diversity and a plethora of ‘-­isms’, drawing on material from a range of historical eras and global traditions. The term ‘contemporary’ is used much less in theatre than in other art forms in the UK. Instead, ‘new writing’ is used to refer to British plays written in

‘But is it art?’ 37

a tradition from the 1950s, typically by young writers, for subsidised theatre (Sierz, 2008). Another prevalent term is ‘fringe theatre’, which refers to highly experimental and reactionary works, often done on a tight budget in a small venue (Haydon, 2008). In the small amount of academic work which seeks to define contemporary theatre, authors point again to the plurality of styles being employed and the way in which much contemporary theatre is rooted in the political and social issues of the day (Sierz, 2008; Schuhbeck, 2012). So, what does ‘contemporary’ mean in our research? Our answer while conducting this study was to hand the question over to audiences and partners to crowdsource a definition. Our concern was not to produce a theoretical definition but to understand what the ‘contemporary’ meant to audiences and how their arts experiences shaped their own definition of the term. In other words, what does ‘contemporary’ signify to audiences, and does it hold meaning for them? How does the category of ‘contemporary’ shape audience engagement? In the rest of this chapter, we draw upon our interviews to build a sociological definition of ‘the contemporary’, showing the multifaceted ways in which the term was understood by participants across multiple art forms and ending with a discussion of the role of stereotypes in forming these definitions.

3.1  Defining the contemporary ‘This project is called Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts. Is “contemporary” a word that you would use to describe what you go to? What does “contemporary’ ” mean to you?’ 3.1.1  ‘Contemporary’ as recent

When asked to define what ‘contemporary’ meant to them, some participants first reverted to a kind of dictionary definition of ‘contemporary’, meaning ‘of the time’, including anything which is made today: ‘I suppose anything that’s made now is contemporary, isn’t it?’ (Br37) and ‘Well, I  take it in its perhaps literal sense of now, here now, today. And, all art has been contemporary in its time’ (Lv07). Since this begs the question of a time span on something being made ‘today’, some attempted to define a date at which the arts became contemporary, often contrasting this to an earlier ‘modern’ period: ‘Some people say contemporary is September  11th 2001, ’cos that’s when everything changed’ (Lv03) and ‘I think about the last 30  years as contemporary because I was alive, and I’m contemporary’ (Lv12). Estimates varied on whether contemporary art could have come from 30 years ago or only in the last five (Lv21). Others wondered whether the ‘contemporary’ period had already seen its end: Contemporary and modern almost sounds a bit dated now  .  .  . if you compare it to food, . . . some people might still call it ‘nouvelle cuisine’. By default, it’s no longer ‘nouvelle’. It’s so dated now as a term. But some

38  ‘But is it art?’

people still use that as a term. I think it’s the same for ‘modern art’ or ‘contemporary art’. It’s quite a dated term. (Lv32) Contemporary art could also be defined as work which was totally new, ‘new stuff that’s being done today’ (Ld23) or ‘new, of our time and that hasn’t been done before’ (Ld33). But others cared less about the recency of the work and more about the artist, defining ‘the contemporary’ as artists who ‘are alive and working now’ (Lv12) or artists that ‘aren’t well known, younger artists’ (Ld14). Echoing the definitions in academic articles and blogs discussed earlier, these comments suggest that while the dictionary definition may be an inclusive way of describing ‘contemporary’ as anything relatively recent, the way in which it is used and understood by participants was considerably more nuanced. However, participants tended not to stay wedded to this dictionary definition, instead describing how they themselves use ‘contemporary’: ‘just because it’s done today, it doesn’t mean it’s “contemporary”. If you do a watercolour in a style of Turner, for example, then you wouldn’t describe that as contemporary’ (Lv10). Three caveats to this definition therefore emerged, discussed in turn in the following sections, centring on contemporary art as experimental and avant-­garde, speaking to today’s world and alternative and challenging. 3.1.2  ‘Contemporary’ as experimental

‘Contemporary’ was described by some participants in a way synonymous with ‘avant-­garde’, with the idea of contemporary arts as experimenting, breaking new ground or somehow pushing an art form forward into the future, rejecting traditional or classical models: ‘what is contemporary? I suppose I would say it’s contemporary as opposed to classic, much more defined by type rather than timescales’ (Lv09) and ‘for me, [“contemporary”] is anything avant-­garde, it is anything that kind of shuns the classical approach . . . it is anything that is new, different, ground-­breaking, not been done before’ (Lv21). As such, phrases such as ‘very contemporary’ were used to indicate the level of experiment involved. For some participants, this had a positive sentiment, and they talked of how they were interested in seeing and supporting the cutting edge of an art form (see Section 7.1). One participant highlighted a sense of transience, that contemporary works were often shown once and never again, unlike the stalwarts of classical traditions: I feel more of a sense of urgency to watch [contemporary shows] because they might only be around for a short amount of time . . . if you miss it there might not be another chance to see it.  .  .  . I kind of feel like it’s maybe a bit more transient as well, so, yeah, that’s what contemporary means to me. (Ld32)

‘But is it art?’ 39

For others, however, ‘contemporary’ was used in combination with words like ‘weird’: ‘the only thing I  know about [the contemporary arts] is from my mum. . . . She would go to contemporary arts events and it’d be all sorts of things, which were really weird really’ (Lv11). This was in contrast to other current but seemingly not ‘contemporary’ works such as pop songs or musical theatre: ‘who’s to say that Katy Perry isn’t contemporary art? . . . I suppose then I would split her off as pop . . . and contemporary feels somewhere outside of that . . . something edgy or challenging or different’ (Br37). It is this definition of ‘the contemporary’ as experimental and strange that seems to most align with the fierce criticism levelled at organisations such as the Turner Prize discussed in the introduction. Since we recruited participants who were in some way engaged with the contemporary arts, it is likely that these views were underrepresented in our dataset compared to the general population. 3.1.3  ‘Contemporary’ as speaking to now

Around one-­third of our participants defined ‘contemporary’ far more by its content than by its style or format. Contemporary arts were seen as those which could only have been made in the contemporary world: In music, [‘contemporary’] can cover people like Max Richter, or Arvo Pärt, whose music doesn’t sound remotely avant-­garde, but you know, it’s definitely contemporary, because [they] couldn’t have written it any other time. (Ld13) Use of technology was one of the most prominent ways in which a piece could be unquestionably made in the contemporary world. Alternatively, ‘contemporary’ could mean that the artwork reflected changing priorities in the cultural industries, such as the growth in participatory works or the inclusion of amateur and community art-­making: ‘when someone says “contemporary”, I do think of . . . maybe it involving more [amateurs] . . . people that haven’t maybe been performers’ (Lv25). Finally, contemporary works could ‘speak to today’ by reflecting developments in social relations that could not have been written about in a historical period or by capturing the social and political zeitgeist of the 21st century: ‘they reflect the values of today and issues of today’ (Ld05). This certainly echoes the definitions of various types of contemporary arts as being reflective of the increasingly globalised world in which it is created. An interesting question emerged from this about the place of modernised theatre productions within the idea of ‘contemporary’. Productions such as the Liverpool Everyman’s 2018 Othello in which the titular character was reconceived as a lesbian were seen to use an old text to make a contemporary point about the world (Gardner, 2018). While many classic works could be seen to speak to the human condition in a way that continues to be relevant, there was something specific about these updated interpretations that demonstrated how

40  ‘But is it art?’

performers, producers and directors were deliberately re-­creating older works for a modern world: ‘it would be so easy to think about [a “contemporary”] Romeo and Juliet . . . she’s white, he’s black. . . . . . it’s adapted to this historical period. That’s my definition of contemporary art’ (Lv18). This appeared to be far easier with theatre works, which demanded production decisions around historical or modernised performances, than it was for visual art, which would be reliant on innovative curation to put a contemporary ‘spin’ on old works: ‘somewhere like the Tate . . . if they do a retrospective or something like that . . . I would say it’s contemporary because of being put together at this time’ (Br01). This particular definition of ‘contemporary’ draws in larger debates about the cultural specificity of artworks compared to their ability to speak to the universal human condition. Regardless of the age of the work being presented, the very act of showing it to contemporary audiences means that viewers will draw their own insights about the contemporary world: ‘you can only perceive it through the lens of our own context, our own time’ (Ld20). That being said, defining ‘contemporary’ so broadly risks rendering the word meaningless and ignoring the specific time-­bound and stylistic aspects which the word indicates for audiences. 3.1.4  ‘Contemporary’ as alternative and challenging

These questions led to discussions about the relevance of the year of creation and ideas of ‘contemporary’ for determining the nature of audience engagement. Five participants ended their discussion of ‘contemporary’ by saying how little it mattered to them whether a piece was contemporary. What mattered more was that the term ‘contemporary’ suggested that a work would be alternative, challenging or thought provoking, all of which could be a positive or negative connotation. ‘Contemporary’ could signal a deliberate distancing from the mainstream, implying that the work was not designed for a mass audience and may not appeal to or might even offend some people: ‘if I was to think about it I’d probably say like alternative or like left field or like non-­mainstream I’d probably say’ (Br34). This definition not only implies a small audience but also that the work is untried and untested, connecting to ideas of experiment and the potential that artists won’t quite ‘pull it off’ (see Chapter 7). Under this definition, work would no longer have the same sense of the contemporary once it became popular: ‘if too many people know about it then it kind of isn’t contemporary anymore, even if it is brand new. It kind of carries that sense of not secrecy, but underground, pushing against something’ (Ld17). The negative side of this is that work can seem to appeal to ‘hipsters’ (Lv05), loaded with ideas of self-­ conscious and performative rejection of the mainstream, and so carry negative connotations of ‘privilege’ (Lv05) (Wasielewski, 2018). Contemporary was also associated with the idea of challenge. The distinction between alternative and mainstream quickly becomes embroiled in ideas of art and entertainment, and participants described contemporary works as

‘But is it art?’ 41

those which presented a challenge to audiences rather than escapism: ‘It’s stuff that makes you think’ (Br24) and ‘modern, forward-­thinking, different, challenging’ (Ld41). The challenge that these works offered could stem from any of the definitions just discussed: from the work being new and unfamiliar, being experimental and strange or being a confronting commentary on today’s societal issues. While some participants were attracted to the idea of being challenged, other participants saw the term ‘contemporary’ as a signal that they would not understand the work: ‘[“contemporary”] sounds like modern, complex, like I[’m] not going to understand it, . . . like it’s not going to make sense to me unless somebody explains it’ (Lv43) and ‘contemporary makes me think of that weird spoken poetry kind of stuff, or modern art that I  don’t really understand’ (Lv01). ‘Contemporary’ was therefore depicted as a serious and even ‘depressing’ (Ld36) arts experience, with intense intellectual and emotional engagement – appealing for some, but not for everyone. 3.1.5  Relevance of the ‘contemporary’

In each of these definitions, ‘contemporary’ is effectively defined in relation to another body of work, whether that is older work (see Section 3.1.1), traditional styles (see Section 3.1.2), historical settings (see Section 3.1.3) or mainstream entertainment (see Section 3.1.5). Being able to describe something as ‘contemporary’ is therefore dependent on knowledge of this alternative body of work. Perhaps it is more relevant to ask not whether a work is ‘contemporary’ but ‘to whom it is contemporary’. Works could still ‘feel’ contemporary to participants, even if they were not created recently: ‘even though Egon Schiele’s stuff is dead old, it still feels quite relevant. Like, some of his drawings look like they could have been done, like, a year ago’ (Lv39). These works may not ‘feel’ contemporary to someone working in the art form today but can be experienced as contemporary by audiences. In order to test the prevalence of each of these definitions of ‘contemporary’, we asked our national survey respondents (n = 120) how they would define ‘the contemporary’ (see Table 3.1). The national survey once again showed the multi-­faceted nature of the term ‘contemporary’, as 62% of participants chose multiple options. The most common combination was that ‘contemporary’ was ‘new work made recently’ Table 3.1 Responses to the National Survey defining ‘contemporary’ Which, if any, of these definitions best fit your understanding of the term ‘contemporary arts’? (Please limit your choice to 1 or 2 options) Any new work made recently 57 responses (48%) Artwork that responds to or says something about our times 64 responses (53%) Artwork that is experimental, strange or weird 27 responses (23%) Artwork that is alternative or different from the mainstream 45 responses (38%) I don’t really know what contemporary arts means 5 responses (4%) Other (please specify) 8 responses (7%)

42  ‘But is it art?’

which ‘says something about our times’, with 19% of participants selecting these two options. This was followed by 15% choosing to define ‘the contemporary’ just as ‘new work made recently’ and 14% defining it as ‘alternative’ work which ‘says something about our times’. The recency of the work being produced and the idea that it says something about our times come out as the most important factors in respondents’ understanding of ‘contemporary’. The free text answers written when participants selected ‘Other’ mirror the interviews again, specifying a time period, indicating that contemporary work was made by living artists, suggesting that contemporary art was thought provoking, political and deliberately distanced itself from the mainstream. That there were no surprises in the response to these questions suggests that we have captured the key variants of ‘contemporary’ from our interview analysis, crowdsourcing a definition of ’ contemporary’ that sits somewhere within the following four attributes: 1 Artwork that is made recently, or since 1970, or by living/young artists. 2 Artwork in which the artist is seeking to experiment, break boundaries and push the art form forward, taking a risk that it may not work, often strange and bizarre 3 Artwork that responds to or says something about our times, often prompting the audience to confront their own existing beliefs. 4 Artwork that sits outside the mainstream, often deliberately rejecting ideas of entertainment and mass appeal. For arts organisations, then, using the term ‘contemporary’ can be a helpful adjective to set audience expectations that a work is untried and untested, potentially challenging or a bit strange. Much harder for organisations is to find alternative means of description for works that do not necessarily fit this stereotype, finding a way to let audiences know when work is playful or spectacular or uplifting.

3.2  The place of the contemporary in each art form As we began conducting interviews, it quickly became clear in this project that the term ‘contemporary’ was not necessarily meaningful for participants across their whole arts engagement. Our interview schedule (see Appendix B) included prompts for participants to talk about contemporary and classic, traditional or mainstream art within each art form. In film or theatre, this became a confusing term for many participants, while dance and visual art had the strongest sense of what was meant by ‘the contemporary’. The phrase ‘contemporary dance’ was one that participants were on the whole quite comfortable with: ‘it is generally understood that . . . “contemporary dance” means a thing and we all kind of generally know what that means’ (Br31). While participants were unsure whether ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’ were better terms to describe recent visual art, again there was a common sense of what these terms

‘But is it art?’ 43

connoted: ‘I associate [the word “contemporary”] more with pictorial art I guess, more like paintings and sculpture and that side of things’ (Lv27). For other art forms, participants questioned the relevance of ‘contemporary’ or even ‘modern’ for characterising their engagement or explaining an event to someone else: Unless it’s something specific like contemporary dance, I tend not to use it. . . . If it’s a film, I’ll use the genre term. If it’s theatre, I tend to use either the name of the performer or the play or the genre again. (Lv08) Similarly, an avid theatregoer from London described how ‘contemporary’ for her often has connotations of ‘weird’ drawings or choreography and felt that she had to ‘remind herself ’ in the interview that ‘contemporary’ means ‘in the moment’ and therefore included the majority of the theatre she attended (Ld04). For art forms such as theatre, music and film, participants felt that the genre of the artwork or which artists were involved in its creation was a much more significant for indicating the experience of the work than whether or not it was made recently, supporting the idea that the term ‘contemporary’ is often most useful as an indicator of alternative, challenging or experimental work. Furthermore, two participants pointed out that ‘contemporary’ only has significant meaning in art forms for which the point of reference is classical: ‘if someone’s using the word contemporary it’s probably because they come from a framework in which there’s something other than contemporary art . . . [that is the] default art’ (Br27). Even within a single art form, the idea of ‘contemporary’ could have different meanings: There was [a recent exhibition by] a guy that I would have called ‘contemporary’ . . . but he was painting in the 60s . . . the oldest music you would probably go out and hear in a DJ set would probably be the 60s music and sometimes 50s, but it’s normally going to be dance music made in the last 20 years. (Lv45) Similarly, in film the term ‘contemporary’ is rendered meaningless, with genre distinctions (romcom, horror, action) and differences in production (Hollywood, arthouse, independent) taking on greater significance. As the majority of the screenings in any given cinema are new releases, ‘the minute I say [“film”] already it’s . . . I don’t have to use the word “contemporary” ’ (Ld19). The attitude taken into the cinema, that most films seen on the big screen will be new and therefore unfamiliar to the audience, is one that is totally alien in other forms, most notably classical music. It is only in investigating these art forms together that the differences in priority between historical and new work becomes so strikingly apparent.

44  ‘But is it art?’

Technology has a strong role in shaping the relationship between contemporary and classical within each art form: the more prominent a role technological advancement plays in the development of an art form, the more the art form seems to orientate towards new work. Film is the obvious example here, with technology such as computer-­generated imagery (CGI) advancing at such a rate as to quickly make films look old (Miesfjord, 2020). Popular music has similarly been at the forefront of audio technology advances and therefore has the same emphasis on the new (Théberge, 2001). On the other hand, the live performance setup of art forms such as ballet and classical music have remained remarkably similar over hundreds of years and may go some way to explain why classical works remain the touchstone of both art forms. Given that film and popular music present as the two most contemporary-­ facing art forms, it is significant that they are both strongly rooted in recorded media and commercial industries. In film especially, the text and the performance are synonymous, and there is not the same act of mediation or re-­performance that happens in theatre, opera, ballet or classical music (Auslander, 2008). The ability to access the original work repeatedly through reproductions (increased with the rise of film and music streaming services) means that the familiar and the new are readily available in each of these art forms, each within highly commercialised industries in whose interest it is to promote the most recent offering. The significance here is that the structuring of each art form – being primarily orientated towards either classical or contemporary works – makes engagement with the contemporary a very different prospect for audiences. In classical music and dance, the contemporary represents the alternative, niche or challenging section of the art form, and we have seen in previous studies in classical music how frequently contemporary art music is rejected or mistrusted by classical music attenders (Pitts, Dobson, Gee, & Spencer, 2013; Price, 2017). In popular music or cinema, on the other hand, the contemporary is something that is engaged with regularly, while mechanisms such as plugging new songs on the radio (Negus, 1993) and trailers and the media circuit of new films (Johnston, Vollans, & Greene, 2016) help to introduce audiences to work that is unfamiliar. 3.2.1  Stereotypes of the contemporary

The familiarity and prevalence of contemporary film and contemporary popular music did not elicit strong stereotypes from our participants. This was in stark contrast to contemporary dance, contemporary art music, contemporary visual art and, to some extent, contemporary theatre. While we recruited participants who were at least somewhat interested in the contemporary arts, we frequently found that within every attender is a nonattender (see Chapter 5) and that stereotypes of the contemporary within various art forms were still present in our interviews. Contemporary dance evoked ideas of the ‘experimental to the point of ridicule’ (Lv27) for some participants. The way in which it was described was

‘But is it art?’ 45

often quite specifically anti-­ballet: ‘you look like you’re doing a mixture of yoga and stretches’ (Ld04), ‘throwing bodies around the floor for the hell of it, and flexing feet’ (Ld40). Participants struggled to see the skill or any beauty in the dancers’ movements, especially when these were seen as pedestrian (cf. Dempster, 2008). This was echoed in the music used for contemporary dance, which was weird and ‘off-­beat’ (Lv26) compared to the lush romantic music of ballets like Swan Lake or The Nutcracker. Furthermore, the phrase ‘interpretive dance’ was used interchangeably with ‘contemporary dance’, and some stereotypes around new choreography centred on the dancers doing things like ‘pretending to be trees’ (Lv01), a strangely specific stereotype also featured in The Dance Movement blog ‘What Is Contemporary Dance’ (n.a., 2017). There was a common theme through these comments that participants knew that the dancers were trying to communicate something but did not understand what that was supposed to be: ‘there was six people in these, like, grey body socks . . . and they just, kind of, walked around with their arms in the air. . . . I was just there being like “they’re not really dancing, and I don’t understand” ’ (Br33). Finally, there is a sense of weirdness in the way in which dancers are dressed and in the way they move, potentially being different for the sake of it (Lv33) and taking itself too seriously while moving in a way that evoked laughter in participants unfamiliar with this style. [I went to a contemporary dance event where] this guy was dressed in a way that made him look naked. . . . He did a lot of sprawling around on the floor and then eventually kind of getting up . . . and he would like come right up to you. And it was dark with just like flashing lights. (Lv44) I went to go see a contemporary dance piece [in a church] and I remember thinking, ‘That has been way too much vagina that I’ve just seen on stage, for a dance show in a church!’ (Ld02) New music stereotypes were difficult to pin down, since contemporary music was often interpreted as popular music, and participants were not necessarily aware enough of contemporary classical music or contemporary opera to have stereotypes about its style: Yeah, do you listen to new classical music? New? No, I wouldn’t know about, I hadn’t even thought of that, no. (Lv01) What about something like a premiere, a new kind of contemporary piece? I don’t really know what to say on that one (laughing). (Lv28)

46  ‘But is it art?’

When participants did have stereotypes of new art music, they often came from engaging with classical music and were fervent in their condemnation of ‘plinky-­plonky’ or ‘screechy’ (Br31) works: ‘Turnage is [different for the sake of it], awful, crap, shit . . . the musical equivalent of . . . Damien Hirst’ (Lv33) and ‘I go with Thomas Beecham [and his opinion of Schoenberg]: “I don’t know if I’ve heard it but I think I’ve trodden in some once” ’ (Ld39). The experience of ‘having to sit through’ discordant music was described as ‘appalling’ (Lv21). Contemporary music was stereotyped as ‘noise’, implying an ugliness to the music, a lack of perceived skill in writing, and questioning of whether this could be classed as music: ‘[my wife and I don’t go to] the “bing banga bash” stuff as she calls it . . . Stockhausen and people like that’ (Lv06) and ‘ “avant garde” [music] just seems like noises to me . . . you need melodies, you know, a bit you can latch on to [and] whistle” ’ (Lv17). There is a strong sense of contemporary music being an unwanted alternative to more familiar, preferred repertoire for these participants, which is reinforced by the ‘sandwich’ programming habit of many classical music promoters, which creates reluctant audiences for new music: ‘very often in a mainstream concert that the minute anything cacophonous comes on, most of the audience are sitting there gritting their teeth thinking “My god, when’s this gonna finish?” ’ (Bh29). Above all these art forms, stereotypes in contemporary visual art most strongly centred on certain artists and artworks, which were commonly known across the dataset. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, in particular, sparked highly contrasting opinions on the legitimacy of their work. Both came under fire for whether or not participants could perceive any artistic skill – ‘you’ve got Tracey Emin with a little line drawing that looks like something I  did when I  was pissed at 4.00am in the morning’ (Ld39) – and were particularly irate about the amount that this work would sell for: ‘I’m not going to pay £200 to put that on my wall, when I could do that if I really wanted it on my wall’ (Br39). Once again, perception of skill was also related to beauty: ‘several times I was looking out of the window [of the Tate] and I thought “the view out of here is a better bit of art than any of this” ’ (Lv20). Contemporary theatre had the fewest stereotypes of these art forms, perhaps because the continued popularity of musical theatre gave an awareness that new works could still be accessible and enjoyable. For participants who were less comfortable with theatre, the small setting of more experimental theatre could increase their anxiety about attendance, as the role of the audience was not easy to determine from the promotional materials, and they were concerned that they may be forced to join in: ‘I don’t like audience participation and this sounds as though you might have to get involved as a spectator’ (NS102). Otherwise, participants’ concerns about theatre were less centred on whether a play was old or new but whether it was a ‘straight play’ and therefore might be ‘depressing’: ‘I play bridge with two people who . . . every week they’ll have been to see something . . . that sound[s] depressing . . . and often they’ll say they come out feeling really depressed. I say, “Why would you . . .?” ’ (Ld36).

‘But is it art?’ 47

While these stereotypes had characteristics unique to each art form, two common themes emerged. First, they can all be united by a perceived lack of skill in the artwork being produced. Dancers ‘rolling around on the floor’, musicians ‘making noise’ and visual artists exhibiting an unmade bed were all actions that participants could do without having had any training in art: ‘in my mind anyway . . . contemporary installations can be just like a person in a room ripping sheets of paper . . . and most people will be like, “What the hell is that?” ’ (Lv27). Participants were often annoyed by the idea that the artist had put very little effort into their work and that something which anyone could have created was designated ‘art’ simply because it was made by an artist. The level of skill involved is therefore inextricably linked to the question of whether or not a work can be considered ‘art’, implying that many participants’ definition of art involves a high level of skill. The other common thread through these criticisms was that participants could not ascertain what the artist was trying to say through their work. In the dancer’s weird gestures, in the visual artist’s abstract paintings, in the seemingly random noises of new music, participants struggled to attach any meaning to individual elements of the work. Since these complaints were rarely levelled at classical works, it suggests that it is something about the artwork being experimental or weird that causes participants to search for a reason for its strangeness. This highlights the importance of art being a source of communication as part of participants’ evaluation of whether or not something can be called good art (an extended discussion of the anger inspired by contemporary art can be found in Section 9.3).

3.3  Conclusions: skill and meaning While contemporary arts could draw fierce criticism when believed to not exhibit sufficient artistic skill and meaning, not all contemporary artists were rejected on these terms. Two of the most frequently referenced contemporary artists in the audience interviews were Matthew Bourne (n = 30) and Grayson Perry (n = 35). Both these artists are relatively well known in the UK: Matthew Bourne is one of the highest-­grossing choreographers today (Mackrell, 2016), included in the GCSE1 Dance curriculum and his all-­male Swan Lake was launched into general knowledge when it appeared at the end of Billy Elliot (Daldry et al., 2000). Grayson Perry, as well as being a contemporary visual artist with a focus on colourful and controversial works in traditional crafts such as tapestry and pottery, has made a lucrative career as an outspoken critic of the contemporary arts industry, with TV series (Crombie & Lord, 2012), radio appearances (Perry, 2013) and a number of books (Perry, 2014). Throughout the interviews, Bourne and Perry were heralded as examples of contemporary art that participants could truly connect with, in stark contrast to figures such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, whose work came under sharp criticism from many participants in the project. Given the intense criticism levelled at much of the contemporary arts world, how is it that Matthew Bourne and Grayson Perry have become so well loved

48  ‘But is it art?’

amongst our participants? Both are connected by their modern adaptation of old techniques. Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake could be described as contemporary ballet, since it does not do away with the language of ballet but uses the highly codified movements in a freer way: ‘I saw [Matthew Bourne’s] Swan Lake when it first came out, amazing, because they were swans. He had studied swans and that’s how they move, so I liked that’ (Lv04). Similarly, in a defiant step away from his contemporary art training, Grayson Perry has predominantly focused on what could be called traditional crafts of pottery and tapestry throughout his career, adapting these ancient art forms to make works that are vibrant, colourful and make statements about society today. Being rooted in the language of these traditional art forms appeared to make it easier for participants to perceive the skill involved in their creation: ‘he did a big show, which was all tapestry work, it was amazing . . . because it was an ancient medium . . . but he did it in a really contemporary way’. Furthermore, Perry’s political works have a clarity of meaning that was often lost in more conceptual or abstract work (see Section  5.1). Grayson Perry’s Brexit vases or his Vanity of Small Differences tapestries offer a tangible commentary on contemporary society, and participants enjoyed being made to reflect on their social world: He is an incredibly talented artist as well as someone who has a lot to say. . . . It is incredible what he has made, and it is also incredible what he is saying. When I go to more traditional art galleries, it’s very beautiful, but after so many paintings you are kind of like zoning out a little bit and there isn’t as strong a thread to kind of think about how it is talking about your world and how it is affecting your perception of your world, which I think is such an interesting cool aspect of art, is how it actually kind of changes what you are thinking. (Br16) Matthew Bourne’s works were considerably less politically motivated, but there was still a sense amongst participants that he was trying to make a traditional technique speak to a modern world. The decision to give Swan Lake an all-­ male cast was not only a deliberate rejection of ballet conventions but also a rejection of the gender-­and heteronormative roles within classical dance. Furthermore, subsequent productions by Matthew Bourne have more explicitly brought works into the 21st century through contemporary adaptations: ‘Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, that was quite contemporary, and he brought a sort of Twilight influence into it’ (Lv21). Both artists in very different ways manage to make their work comprehensible to audiences unlike much of the contemporary art criticised by participants earlier in the chapter. Finally, it is worth questioning the impact on the individual of both artists being fairly well known and popular. Grayson Perry is well known to the general public through his various media appearances, in which he is vocally critical of the elitism and pretence of the arts world. His thoughts on

‘But is it art?’ 49

masculinity especially resonated with more liberal participants, which not only made them more aware of his art but also made them more enamoured of him as an artist: Grayson Perry [is] a really interesting person. . . . I’ve learnt more about him and this work and his sort of influences and things, his ideas on masculinity and stuff like that, and that he’s done a load of TV stuff. (Br32) Matthew Bourne is considerably less present in the media, but the featuring of the male swan at the end of Billy Elliot brought his all-­male production to the consciousness of a wider public. Perhaps the large appeal of these artists has a cumulative effect, turning them from outsider figures to acceptable household names. The popularity of these two artists shows how contemporary work, while fulfilling the definition of being recent, experimental and speaking to now, could find a way to connect with large audiences through a visible demonstration of skill and clarity of artistic message. This, combined in Grayson Perry’s case with being a media personality, led participants to conclude that they were authentic and sincere in their artistic intentions, a topic which we return to in consideration of arts talk (see Section 7.3) and access and inclusion (see Section 9.3) later in the book.

Note 1 General Certificate of Secondary Education: school examinations taken by students aged 16 in the UK in which dance is an optional subject choice taken by around 8,000 people each year.

References Auslander, P. (2008). Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture (2nd ed.). Oxford, New York and Canada: Routledge. Bedinghaus, T. (2019, January  10). What is contemporary dance? [Webpage] LiveAbout. Retrieved from www.liveabout.com/what-­is-­contemporary-­dance-­1007423 Blocker, J. (2015). Becoming past: History in contemporary art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boughen, S. (2014, June 15). Explainer: What is contemporary dance? The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/explainer-­what-­is-­contemporary-­dance-­25713 Chilvers, I., & Glaves-­Smith, J. (2015). Contemporary art. In I. Chilvers & J. Glaves-­Smith (Eds.), The Oxford dictionary of modern and contemporary art [Online] (3rd ed.). Retrieved from www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191792229.001.0001/acref-­ 9780191792229-­e-­581?rskey=JqySzR&result=590 Cottingham, D. (2005). Modern art: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Crombie, N. (Director), & Lord, D. (Executive Producer). (2012). All in the best possible taste with Grayson Perry [Television mini-­series]. London: Seneca Productions.

50  ‘But is it art?’ Daldry, S. (Director), Hall, L. (Writer), Brand, C., Ross, T., Thompson, D. M., & Wharton, N. (Executive Producers). (2000). Billy Elliot [Motion picture]. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures. Danto, A. C. (1997). After the end of art: Contemporary art and the pale of history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dempster, E. (2008). The choreography of the pedestrian. Performance Research, 13(1), 23–28. Esaak, S. (2019, July 24). What is contemporary art? [Blog post] ThoughtCo. Retrieved from www.thoughtco.com/what-­is-­contemporary-­art-­182974 Foster, H., Bryan-­Wilson, J., Kester, G., Elkins, J., Kwon, M., Shannon, J., . . . Mcdonough, T. (2009). Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’. October, 130, 3–125. Gardner, L. (2018, April  3). Othello as an out lesbian: Why Golda Rosheuvel’s time is now. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/apr/03/othello­as-­an-­out-­lesbian-­why-­golda-­rosheuvels-­time-­is-­now Haydon, A. (2008, November  4). Fringe theatre is too conventional. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/nov/04/fringe-­theatre Huyssen, A. (1986). After the great divide: Modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Johnston, K. M., Vollans, E., & Greene, F. L. (2016). Watching the trailer: Researching the film trailer audience. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 13(2), 56–85. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2013/Issue%202/5.pdf Kwan, S. (2017). When is contemporary dance? Dance Research Journal, 49(3), 38–52. Little, S. (2004). -­Isms: Understanding art. New York: Universe. Mackrell, J. (2016, November 2). Bourne’s supremacy: The blockbuster choreographer puts on The Red Shoes. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/ nov/02/matthew-­bourne-­the-­red-­shoes-­interview-­sadlers-­wells Miesfjord, T. (2020). CGI moments that have aged terribly [Webpage]. Looper. Retrieved from www.looper.com/154175/cgi-­moments-­that-­have-­aged-­terribly/ Meyer, R. (2013). When was contemporary art? Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press. Negus, K. (1993). Plugging and programming: Pop radio and record promotion in Britain and the United States. Popular Music, 12, 57–68. doi:10.1017/S0261143000005353 Perry, G. (2013). Playing to the gallery: 2013. The Reith Lectures [Radio series]. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Perry, G. (2014). Playing to the gallery: Helping contemporary art in its struggle to be understood. London: Penguin. Pitts, S. E., Dobson, M. C., Gee, K. A., & Spencer, C. P. (2013). Views of an audience: Understanding the orchestral concert experience from player and listener perspectives. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 10(2), 65–95. Retrieved from www. participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%202/5.pdf Place, The. [Planet Dance]. (2015, January 16). Planet dance: A visitor’s guide to contemporary dance [YouTube]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aeBhLakp3c&feature= youtu.be Price, S. M. (2017). Risk and reward in classical music concert attendance: Investigating the engagement of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ audiences with a regional symphony orchestra in the UK (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16628/ Schuhbeck, B. (2012, February  22). Less art, more substance. New tendencies in contemporary theatre [Blog post]. Notes on Metamodernism. Retrieved from www. metamodernism.com/2012/02/22/less-­art-­more-­substance-­new-­tendencies-­in-­contemporary­theatre/

‘But is it art?’ 51 Sierz, A. (2008, December  17). New writing in Britain: How do we define contemporary? [Blog post] The Sidcup Papers. Retrieved from http://theatrefutures.org.uk/sidcup_ papers/2008/12/17/new-­writing-­in-­britain-­how-­do-­we-­define-­the-­contemporary/ Silka, P., alias of Ksenija Pantelić. (2016, March 30). What is contemporary art and how can we define it today? [Webpage] Widewalls. Retrieved from www.widewalls.ch/ what-­is-­contemporary-­art/ Smith, T. (2009). What is contemporary art? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, T. (2010). The state of art history: Contemporary art. The Art Bulletin, 92, 366–383. doi:10.1080 /00043079.2010.10786119 Stallabrass, J. (2004). Contemporary art: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Théberge, P. (2001). ‘Plugged in’: Technology and popular music. In S. Frith, W. Straw, & J. Street (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to pop and rock (pp. 3–25). New York: Cambridge University Press. Wasielewski, A. (2018). Made in Brooklyn: Artists, hipsters, makers, and gentrification. Alresford: Zero Books. n.a. (2017, January  3). What is contemporary dance? [blog post]. The Dance Movement. Retrieved from www.thedancemovement.co.uk/blog/what-­is-­contemporary-­dance

4 Cities for the arts The importance of place in audience engagement

Academic audience research has often been reported as if it is ‘place neutral’: valid reasons of research, ethics, participant confidentiality and commercial sensitivity lead to descriptions of ‘a UK symphony orchestra’ (O’Sullivan, 2009) or ‘a “pro-­am” orchestra in suburban Sydney’ (Garrido & Macritchie, 2018). These neutral descriptions are often a necessary compromise, owing to the additional permissions and collaborative relationships needed to secure more open disclosure of research locations. They also emphasise the generalisability of arts audience research, since the marketing and audience development concerns affecting one regional symphony orchestra will be replicated elsewhere, to a certain extent. However, they disguise the specificity of the effects of venue, programming and, above all, audience experience. Arts attendance, as the following analysis of our four partner cities will show, is place specific at every stage: decisions about what to attend are affected by what is available, where it is and how to get there as well as by the broader context for the experience – the ‘arts ecology’ of which it is a part (Behr, Brennan, Cloonan, Frith, & Webster, 2016; Holden, 2015; Sound Diplomacy, 2019) (see Chapter 5). Exceptions to this place-­neutral approach tend to come in studies of a particular moment in the cultural history of a location, notably the extensive research around Cities/Capitals of Culture (CoC) in the UK, which in recent years have included Glasgow (Garcia, 2004), Liverpool (O’Brien, 2010) and Hull (CPPI, 2019). The focus of this research has tended to be on cultural policy and the validity of evaluating the investment and impact of CoC programmes as a form of ‘culture-­led urban regeneration’ (Cox & O’Brien, 2012, p. 94). Pertinent to our research, Liverpool is portrayed in several studies as a problematic case, where the existing cultural infrastructure was insufficiently acknowledged in the public narrative of CoC success (Cox & O’Brien, 2012), and the troubled political past of the city and ongoing social deprivation in its suburbs were ‘disinfected’ in both practice and evaluation: ‘[CoC 2008] displayed a spatial bias towards the city centre leading to stylish regeneration and gentrification while senses of marginalisation amongst residents of peripheral housing estates intensified’ (Boland, 2010, p. 639). Similar criticisms are made of the approach taken in Glasgow, where community activism became set against city governance in resistance to some aspects of the 1990 CoC project (Mooney, 2004). In this

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context, visible attempts to engage local people in CoC programmes can be interpreted as a panacea for this political dissatisfaction, as noted in a review of the changing focus of CoCs from buildings to communities: ‘an open question emerges about whether participation is deployed, instrumentally, as a means to mitigate dissatisfaction and protests around culture-­led regeneration, mega events, gentrification and mass tourism’ (Tommarchi, Hansen,  & Bianchini, 2018, p. 163). Audience experience, beyond the counting of international visitors and local participation, is largely absent from the narratives of CoC research: even Liu’s (2017) study of ‘quality of life’, which included telephone interviews with Liverpool residents, emphasised the effects on the city’s appearance and image over the experiences of attendance and participation in CoC events. Reason and Garcia’s (2007) analysis of the media coverage of Glasgow’s CoC year shows that this emphasis is embedded in the public discourse from the outset: regional identity and image dominate over reporting of specific events, with accessibility and audience reach being the only people-­centred theme (p. 316). Policy, economics and infrastructure also dominate the subsequent critiques of legacy in each city (e.g. Evans, 2005; Gomes & Librero-­Cano, 2018), with such legacy often portrayed as perpetuating inequalities or being unsustainable (Liu, 2016; Boland, Murtagh,  & Shirlow, 2019). Garcia (2005) balances this with a qualitative study exploring the ‘sustainable cultural impacts’ for the venues, grassroots arts organisations and School of Art graduates in Glasgow, suggesting that longer-­term shifts in the cultural landscape are often overshadowed by more measurable economic and social changes (see also Campbell, Cox, & O’Brien, 2017). Audience voices, however, remain underrepresented in the ongoing debates about the value and impact of CoC, and yet the memories and legacies of those arts opportunities will shape a city and its people in a variety of ways, as our Liverpool interviews demonstrated. These City of Culture studies capture specific moments in the cultural and political histories of a place but, as demonstrated in this brief review, tend to take a top-­down, policy-­driven approach, leaving unanswered questions about the experiences of those cities for the people who live, work and visit there. When audiences talk about their cities, however, they tend to start from the point of their own experiences of the cultural offering there: in our previous work, for example, Sheffield audiences have shown strong loyalty to the chamber music offered by Music in the Round (Pitts, 2005; Pitts & Spencer, 2008), Birmingham audiences reference the cultural status of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) (Gross & Pitts, 2016; Price, 2017) and in each place, the experience of the arts is felt to be distinctive and situated, shaped by the geography of the place and the strong cultural influence of particular individuals and organisations. UACA offered a rare opportunity to explore those claims to distinctiveness and to compare four diverse cities across the UK. Our analysis sought to understand the narratives told around those four locations and to find the points of difference and similarity across the experience of the arts in those places. Our

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interview sample included people who were ‘born and bred’ in each locality and therefore considered themselves to have been shaped by the ethos, values and opportunities of those places. Others were more recent arrivals, navigating the arts scene without that sense of history, and a few others were visitors, travelling into those cities for specific arts events and making comparisons with the places where they lived. The interviews in each city offered up recurring stories – tropes, even – around ‘what people say about . . . ’ the arts, the local people, the council, the funding situation and the provision or lack of specific art forms and venues. While these were experienced as being distinctive to the locality, there were also metanarratives that crossed the four cities, around regeneration and gentrification, access and opportunity, belonging and exclusion. London was undeniably different, as acknowledged by the people who lived there and those who looked in from the outside, comparing their own city to the capital, and making decisions about how often to visit and where London fitted into their cultural consumption. Critical discussion of Birmingham as a city for the arts appeared spontaneously in the life-­history interviews, leading us to focus more purposefully on this topic in the main study. In Bristol, Liverpool and London, our interviewees were therefore asked the direct question ‘What do you think of your city as a place for the arts?’, and in this chapter, we compare descriptions of each city: the ways in which participants in Birmingham and Liverpool were quite defensive of their city as ‘up and coming’ and ‘not as bad as people think’; the awareness in Bristol of a more comfortable, privileged lifestyle which was not universally distributed across the city; and the sense of abundance and cultural confidence in the arts offering in London. In each city, the people we talked to reflected on the ways in which their city was perceived by outsiders and newcomers (see Section 4.3), reporting and challenging the stereotypes of their location. The roles of key venues, people and events in these narratives highlighted similarities of place, even within geographical differences, and so illustrated broader points about the importance of situating audience experience within the wider urban and regional context. This chapter therefore presents place-­specific insights into each of the case study cities as well as drawing out the common mechanisms by which place modulates audience engagement.

4.1 The distinctiveness of place: Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool or ‘a tale of three cities’ The most prominent theme to come out of this strand of analysis was, put simply: London is different. Participants responded to the request to describe the arts provision of their city in a markedly different way in London, emphasising the abundance of arts provision in the city, with a confidence that niche arts were available even if unknown to the participant at that time. The resulting challenge of navigating such a wide and varied arts offering subsequently led to less loyalty to particular organisations than seen in the other cities, where arts attendance was often framed as a means of philanthropic support. Our analysis

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will first consider the descriptions of the three regional cities, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool, where arts engagement was shaped by specific figures, events and venues as well as a wider sense of civic identity. What follows is a portrait of each city, as experienced by our participants, highlighting both idiosyncrasies and the common mechanisms through which cities influence audience experience. 4.1.1  Birmingham: ‘you feel like you’re part of it’

Descriptions of Birmingham were given spontaneously in the pilot study interviews over the course of participants describing their lifelong routes into arts engagement. These generally began with the claim that the city was ‘underrated’ and ‘overlooked’, followed by an assertion that for residents engaged with the arts it was ‘a great place to live and there’s lots happening here’ (Bh09): Birmingham is given a bad time, really, in the English landscape. . . . People taking the mick just because of the accent, or whatever it is. But it’s nonsense. It’s got fantastic arts. . . . It’s just not in London, that’s why people don’t necessarily take it as seriously as they should. (Bh14) Asserting their geographically central place in England, Birmingham residents (‘Brummies’) spoke often in support of their national  – and indeed international  – reputation and saw the arts as contributing to positive perceptions of the city (see also Bryson, 2007). BE Festival, for example, was applauded for its explicitly European focus, while also being strongly situated in the industrial heritage of the city, having staged its first years of productions in a vacated section of the A. E. Harris metal fabricators’ factory. Being locally rooted, while looking outwards, was a common theme in narratives of Birmingham and supported a general sense of ‘up and coming’ potential that was felt to be strengthened by the arts scene: I think there’s room for people to come and play with the space and with the different ideas, so that’s exciting . . . that’s what I like about this particular time in Birmingham, is its potential. (Bh53) Several respondents commented on Birmingham’s reputation for being ‘a friendly city’ and saw this as positively influencing the experience of audience members and of new arts professionals wanting to forge connections in the city: ‘you see the same faces at all these different events, and that’s great for someone who has just moved from somewhere else and doesn’t know anyone’ (Bh38). Inevitably, not everyone experienced the arts scene in this way, and there were some contrastingly negative observations made about the extent to which

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networks overlapped in some ways and excluded people in others, highlighting the challenge of ‘getting the word out to those people who aren’t in the creative scene already’ (Bh03). Concerns about exclusivity of the arts were most acute in discussions of Digbeth, a post-­industrial area of the city in which many small galleries and studios have made their makeshift home. The Digbeth organisations run a ‘First Friday’ event, described as a ‘good, distilled evening of just seeing everything that’s on offer’ (Bh02), but attenders and nonattenders alike were aware that Digbeth ‘really needs some sort of plaque, signpost, something that actually points and says it’s the Cultural Sector down there, the Creative Sector’ (Bh03) to encourage more people to visit: ‘[t]o somebody that isn’t part of that scene, the environment looks like light industrial. You wouldn’t nip in off the pavement to go and see if there’s any artwork to see. It’s not obviously that sort of place’ (Bh43). A strong sense of arts involvement for our Birmingham participants came from community projects, such as Birmingham Opera Company, whose innovative, site-­specific productions of ‘opera amongst the audience’ (Bh01) were frequently mentioned as a highlight of participating in or attending local arts events. Events of this kind, involving ‘half of Birmingham’ (Bh09) will send different messages to the uninvolved half, and there was some awareness in the interviews of the city-­centric nature of cultural provision and the risks of exclusion even within projects that aim to be inclusive. Several more deprived areas of the city were felt to be distanced from the arts world, and attempts to run community projects there had often suffered from lack of sustained funding or council support. Indeed, the main shadow cast over the Birmingham responses came from ‘the cuts’, often referred to without further explanation and therefore clearly embedded in the thinking of the city’s residents. The cancellation of ArtsFest, a weekend of free arts events that ran from 1997 to 2012, was felt to be ‘a disaster’, not only for the loss of the collective cultural experience, but as a channel for arts organisations to reach new audiences: I think ArtsFest made it very easy for arts organisations to reach new audiences, because a lot of people would come to ArtsFest, you know, even if you weren’t that interested in the arts. With that many participants, I mean thousands of participants, and you know, a lot of schools and youth clubs would put in dance and choirs and things in; so if all of their families of every participant came, you know, you’ve got this huge new audience every year, getting information, but that’s gone. (Bh34) Some respondents feared future cuts, including an enthusiastic advocate of DanceXchange, who said that their seasons of international dance were ‘basically what keeps me in Birmingham, and as soon as all of this stops, I’m packing up and leaving’ (Bh33). At the time of our interviews (and still at the time of writing), Birmingham was in the throes of some major city centre building works, including the demolition and replacement of the old library and

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conservatoire, and opinions were strongly divided on whether there was cause for optimism in these changes: one participant reported being ‘so saddened by the insanity of knocking down the library, it’s actually turned me against the city a bit’ (Bh33), while another noted that ‘we’re getting a new conservatoire; that will be interesting, see what happens’ (Bh32). Several felt that Birmingham lacked the performance venues it deserved, even while celebrating the ‘quality of the sound’ (Bh32) in Symphony Hall: a place for international film was reportedly lacking, and recent refurbishments of arts venues had disappointed several residents, as ‘it’s not good enough for a city like Birmingham, it really isn’t. I have quite strong views about that’ (Bh08). A review of Birmingham’s arts provision could not end without mention of the other frequently cited key influencer, Simon Rattle, the ‘charismatic’ conductor who joined the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980 and created a ‘buzz’ around classical music with programming that ‘really opened people’s ears up a lot in Birmingham to the idea that 20th century music wasn’t all that fearsome’ (Bh05). Several regular concert-­goers charted their relationship with CBSO as having pre-­and post-­Rattle phases: ‘not particularly impressed by the CBSO when I first came in 1960, but when Simon Rattle took over, things got very interesting’ (Bh18). Rattle’s wider fame in the city at that time, and later as a figurehead for large-­scale city-­centre development (Grimley, 2014), was believed to have put Birmingham on the map for high-­ quality music-­making and had led to long-­term changes in arts engagement: ‘[h]e was so enthusiastic [he] carried people with him [and] it was a quite amazing time to be coming to concerts in Birmingham’ (Bh35). The prevalence of comments on how Birmingham was perceived and experienced led us to focus more closely on this topic in the main study. Many of the Birmingham participants were volunteers at arts organisations, donors to BCMG or had been amateur participants in projects such as The Rep Theatre’s The Mother and BCMG’s Crowd Out or sung in the chorus for a Birmingham Opera Company production. These routes into arts engagement will be considered further in Chapter 6 but are likely to have skewed the perception of Birmingham as a city for the arts. We therefore sought to explore how place affected the engagement of a more diverse sample of audiences in Bristol, Liverpool and London. 4.1.2  Bristol: ‘the self-­styled cultural capital of the South West’

Bristol, as a more prosperous city in South West England, projected none of the defensive self-­image of Birmingham and Liverpool and was confidently described by one interviewee as ‘probably the best provincial city in the entire country’ (Br44) and by another as ‘punch[ing] above its weight’ (Br30). The population was characterised by one participant as ‘so young and enthusiastic and energetic’ (Br36) (as reflected in the city demographics, see Section 1.2), and while this was credited by some as driving an enthusiasm for cultural ventures and contemporary arts, others noted the risks inherent in a collective

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mindset: ‘it is so comfortable and collaborative and lovely around here, it’s very easy to like give up your ambition and just sort of coast along’ (Br27). Many of our interviewees described making the choice to live in Bristol, often liking or needing its proximity to London; coming for university and staying on; or, in one case, growing up in a neighbouring county where ‘at school and college it was always if you wanted to make something and do something interesting, it was go to Bristol’ (Br40). Bristol was an adopted city for more residents than was the case in Birmingham and Liverpool (with a long history of media and creative arts employment; see Griffiths, Bassett, & Smith, 1999), and there were therefore fewer accounts of long relationships with venues, events and organisations, as illustrated by this exception to that trend: I’m from Bristol, so – and this is the funny thing that, you know, whenever I meet people, they’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s really cool, Bristol, you know. So, when did you move here?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve always lived here’ (laughter). And they’re like, ‘Wow, you know, you’re so lucky.’ And there’s – there’s not – you know, sometimes they’re like, ‘Why have you never moved anywhere?’ But I always sort of justify it like, ‘Well, I don’t need to. There’s – there’s just no point.’ (Br13) Bristol was strongly characterised as a ‘festival city’ and our interviewees mentioned at least 15 different festivals that they had engaged with regularly or recently, from substantial, recurring programmes including Mayfest and Harbourside to grassroots, one-­off graffiti festivals and themed events. This provision was summed up as offering ‘a festival every weekend once the summer starts’ (Br26) and created on the one hand a consensus of ‘a really massive and vibrant art scene’ (Br34) and on the other a challenge for residents and audiences in navigating the diversity and frequency of arts events: I think Bristol is a massive show-­off as a city and that I think we steal all of the fun from lots of other places. And I’ve lived in cities where, erm, it was really simple what you would go to, there would be maybe two things a month that might be of interest, and then so everyone would be at the same stuff, whereas here you’ll have a weekend and it’s like, well I don’t know how to pick between all of these things. (Br28) The festival culture had several distinctive effects on the Bristol arts scene, most notably in the way that the multi-­arts nature of many festivals blurred the boundaries between art forms, making people open to the idea of an unpredictable, rather than genre-­specific events, and fostering a willingness to ‘shift out of your comfort zone’ (Br43), with a tolerance for the fact that ‘not all of it works out’ (Br16). This multi-­arts experience appeared sometimes to inhibit deliberate engagement with an art form, as in the case of circus, which was

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often accidentally encountered ‘at some of the kind of weirder music events’ (Br16) rather than deliberately through organisations such as Circomedia. Festival programming also resulted in a need, noted often in discussions with our partner organisations, to share audiences, since an annual or biennial event has nothing to offer arts attenders in the months between their shows. One audience member reflected on this intermittent programming by saying that ‘If Mayfest had a venue . . . that would be my kind of go-­to’ (Br21), but others navigated multi-­venue attendance to create the sense that ‘almost every night something is going on’ (Br06). Some interviewees viewed the city as well connected with ‘lots of cross-­pollination’ (Br13) of audiences, while others found it a challenge to keep track of events: There is so much amazing stuff going on in the city and it would be rubbish to miss out. I don’t want to do that, so I put in the legwork to make sure that I am on top of it. (Br16) Being culturally engaged in Bristol appeared to be easy in terms of quantity of activity but sometimes difficult to navigate since events were seen as ‘all very individualised so you don’t know that things are going on’ (Br19). This identity as a ‘festival city’ led participants to praise the amount of free and public work that was on offer in the city (see also Arts Council England, 2018b). One newcomer to the city, arriving seven months previously, reported having ‘asked some other people, you know, “Where are the art galleries?”, they told me, you know, there aren’t any, basically, because everything happens in the street’ (Br15). The constant flux of street art, like the festival culture, was described as something that ‘represents Bristol very well’ (Br45) and appeared to make locals aware of their surroundings, since ‘obviously being in Bristol, [you] spend a lot of time looking at street art as well, and trying to like clock new things’ (Br22). Experiences of public art also generated closer connections with the city, since ‘every time you walk down that street there’ll be an essence of that show still in your memory’ (Br31). The plethora of outdoor and free activity in Bristol was of course complemented by a range of established arts venues, including a variety of theatres, galleries and music venues, each known for the specific contribution they made to the arts ecology (see Chapter 5). With Bristol described as a ‘walkable city’ (and mentions of parking and public transport being less frequent than in Birmingham and Liverpool), ‘popping in’ to art galleries and their cafes was often part of people’s experience of the city centre, with the exception of Spike Island, known to be to be ‘out of the way’ and so requiring ‘a special effort’ (Br03). More than in other cities, Bristol residents were prone to mentioning the area in which they lived and to describing the way this affected their proximity to certain venues and to the local ‘art trails’ that were another aspect of the public art in the city. For all the connectedness experienced by engaged arts attenders, there were concerns similar to those in Birmingham that arts

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provision was mainly located in the city centre, where ‘the further you get into town, the more artsy it becomes’ (Br39), and therefore did not reach all sections of the local population: A kind of working-­class person from South Bristol would probably not engage with much of this, and what’s going on with that and I think that’s something that we need to look at as a city as well. I think we’re attracting loads of Londoners and people with a lot of, kind of, cultural language, err, and disposable income, but what about, kind of, I’m a relative outsider to this city as well, but what about the other bits of Bristol and how are they engaging with these, with these spaces? (Br28) The two notable absences from the range of arts venues in Bristol were a dedicated venue for dance to answer the question ‘Where is the dance in Bristol?’ (Br14), and an arena, because ‘if you are a serious city, you’ve got to have an arena, right’ (Br44). The distribution of dance across several venues was a frustration to those people who wanted to engage with that art form and the lack of a single venue for dance meant that some potential audience members were ‘not as tuned into the sort of dance programming that is on in Bristol’ (Br20) while others would travel instead to London and Cardiff to see large-­scale productions. Cardiff was also cited as a nearby rival for the ‘big name’ touring bands and acts, though opinions on the absence of an arena to host them were given as ‘something everybody says’ (Br44) rather than as a keenly felt need for these respondents: ‘I mean, I don’t go to an awful lot of arena things but I suppose it would be nice not to have to trek to Cardiff. . . . It seems a bit anomalous that we don’t have something like that’ (Br30). In general, despite the expressed desirability of having a more local arena, Bristol residents seemed more willing or able to travel for their arts than in other cities: some included nearby Bath in their assessment of the visual arts scene, saying that ‘the two sites together . . . have got it covered’ (Br25), and there were numerous accounts of visits to London for theatre, dance and gallery visits, with membership of Tate galleries being commonplace. Where influential people were a unifying feature of Birmingham arts life, the recurring stories in Bristol were of specific events, which included the Grayson Perry exhibition at Arnolfini, which had been seen by ‘the whole of Bristol’ (Br03, Br05), including twice (Br12) or three times (Br10) by some of our interviewees, apart from the few who ‘missed it’ (Br01). Likewise, a recent Banksy exhibition at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery had resulted in two-­to three-­hour queues for admission, reported as being ‘too much’ for some attenders but ‘pretty worth it’ for others. Participants were confident in the success of such events in bringing in diverse audiences who are not typically seen in art galleries: I think there was something about the nature of Grayson Perry’s work which just feels like it’s very, very real and, erm, slightly different, maybe,

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to other stuff.  .  .  . It does seem like a more diverse set of people [in Arnolfini after the Grayson Perry exhibition] in, kind of, the cafes and things, and, yeah, just on-­site, I suppose, generally, which feels really positive because, erm, you know, ultimately, surely, that’s got to be the greatest outcome is to have, you know, a wider range of people. (Br17) Bristol was summarised as being ‘fairly creative but very small’ (Br05) by one resident, and while some respondents experienced this as a limitation in what was on offer, most seemed to express a pride in their city, feeling ‘so lucky to be in a place like Bristol’ (Br43). The festival culture, public art and sense of ‘pockets of interest’ (Br26) and well-­connected creative scenes appeared to promote a high level of satisfaction in existing audiences, while being sometimes difficult to navigate for newly arrived creative practitioners. An underlying current of unease about how well the arts represented and reached the less affluent and more diverse areas of the city was acknowledged as being addressed, if not always successfully, by some of the arts organisations, for whom ‘there is definitely work to be done in sort of, getting people in the room’ (Br20). Of all the cities involved in our project, Bristol felt to be the most like London and also the most comfortable in its relationship with the capital (see Section 4.3), even while having a distinctive feel that attracted people to live there. 4.1.3  Liverpool: ‘we don’t pretend to be something we’re not’

The most distinctive feature of the Liverpool interviews was the level of unprompted talk about the character of Liverpudlians (or ‘Scousers’) and the ways in which this local identity shaped the city, previously recognised in Dave O’Brien’s (2010) research as the ‘mythology’ of the city (p. 117). Statements of collective identity were commonplace, and arts provision was evaluated as a part of this: ‘the Scouse are very proud, very proud of their city, as rightly they should be’ (Lv37). Describing one another as ‘very honest’ (Lv07), known for ‘being funny people’ (Lv37), and ‘rebellious’ (Lv03), there was a strong collective sense that any unwarranted pretentiousness in the arts would be quickly called out (see Maria Barrett’s 2016 study of working-­class theatre audiences at the Royal Court Liverpool). A higher proportion of our Liverpool interviewees were native to the city than was the case in Bristol, and so the pride in the city had a different feel, more closely linked to supporting local artists and building upon the city’s cultural heritage  – though with sometimes contradictory narratives about what that meant (see Cohen, 2012; Leonard & Strachan, 2010). Several participants made positive references to having ‘[grown] up with the Mersey Poets’ (Lv24) and been influenced by their ethos of ‘art for everyone’ (Lv02), while the Beatles, strongly associated with the music history of the city, were described more negatively as a ‘Liverpool stereotype’ (Lv30), now directed more at visitors than residents: ‘tourists want to see psychedelic art, anything linked to The Beatles’

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(Lv40). Liverpool residents appeared not to want to be too closely tied to their famous musical past, but in other ways being ‘from here’ (Lv37) was a significant filter for engagement with the arts, with ‘a critique of the Liverpool art scene [being] that it tends to show people who are not from Liverpool mainly’ (Lv22). A few references were made to Liverpool’s geographical isolation, being some distance from other major UK cities but accessible to the cruise ships that visit relatively new venues including Tate Liverpool. Prominent events and institutions were referred to as ‘keeping us on the map’ (Lv28), but the sense of being overlooked at a national level was comparable to that expressed by Birmingham residents: If you think about Liverpool compared to other cities, there is that very strong element of counterculture and being different. . . . If you are not careful you will just end up being, in your own way, like Manchester, Leeds, yeah you lose that something special. (Lv14) The comparison with Manchester in this quote was part of another strong theme in Liverpool, that of the ‘chasm between the two [cities]’ (Lv12), with a perception that bands and theatre tours would go to Manchester rather than visit Liverpool (for historical rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester, see Warner, 2011). For some people, this was unproblematic since Manchester was ‘near enough to go to if you want to’ (Lv24), but others described how they ‘just don’t like going to Manchester, even for concerts or anything like that’ (Lv04) or found the travelling difficult or expensive: If you go and see something there at the MEN [Arena] or anything like that you quite often have to miss the end of the set to get the last train back to Liverpool. And I don’t know whether it’s a thing that Manchester do on purpose ’cos they know we’re from Liverpool or whether it’s just a kind of poor bit of planning. (Lv42) The implicit hostility to Manchester in this response was criticised by a few participants, who felt that ‘Liverpool can feel very provincial  .  .  . even just walking down the street, you know everyone’ (Lv37). This could lead to ‘self-­ adulation [because] there’s loads of stuff that I  think we do brilliantly [but] there’s not a realisation of “this is something we’re less good at” ’ (Lv12). To a stronger extent than Birmingham and Bristol, Liverpool appeared to value its self-­sufficiency as a city for the arts: fewer residents making reference to travelling elsewhere to pursue interests that were not served locally, though not everyone was as satisfied as the participant who stated that ‘everything I want is here in Liverpool’ (Lv32). Liverpool was European Capital of Culture in 2008, and when our interviews took place 10 years later, there was still a strong memory of the positive

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effect this had had on arts provision and venues, though with the regret that ‘everything has become very touristy in the last few years, I  suppose since 2008 really’ (Lv36). References to ‘the Giants coming [back] quite soon’ (Lv25) were a shorthand for the decennial celebrations, scheduled to include a parade of the larger-­than-­life puppets that had first visited the city in 2012 and, like in Bristol, such public performances were credited by one participant with ‘taking big cultural events . . . outside of just this small closed-­off city centre arts . . . space and taking it into the street, around the whole city region’ (Lv12). Being Capital of Culture was described as ‘fantastic’ (Lv40) and had contributed to the narrative of Liverpool having ‘really kind of grown and developed’ (Lv31) since a period of high unemployment and political disaffection in the 1980s, but concern was expressed that the legacy of the 2008 investment was being lost: It was the years after that, that it started to go downhill, because it had so much money flushed into it, it almost wasn’t planned properly, to extend the life of that  – that sort of fantastic, you know, momentum that was going on in the arts. (Lv40) Despite these concerns about funding, the city council was perceived by some to ‘know the importance of the arts’ (Lv14) and, in particular, to be supportive of the provision of free, publicly accessible art, which was again connected to the Liverpudlian character of being ‘good at turning up to stuff when it’s free’ (Lv36). The free public festival Light Night, similar to Birmingham’s now defunct ArtsFest, was appreciated for offering open access to arts venues, especially for infrequent attenders, since ‘everywhere feels welcoming then and there’s nowhere that feels inaccessible’ (Lv12), although the scale of the festival could make it hard to navigate. While participants praised the council’s attempts to provide free art, they were also concerned about the impact of building developments on the arts and music scenes: Previous editions [of Biennial] have been a lot more interesting because it has actually been able to take you behind the scenes of bits of historic Liverpool. . . . Maybe the problem is there aren’t those spaces now for them to have as Biennial [venues]. (Lv14) Related to the strong culture of free and accessible arts and culture, references to the student population were higher than in the other cities, seen as contributing to a ‘cultural melting pot’ (Lv35), which impacted positively on the diversity and energy of the city: The student culture has been fantastic for the city. It’s brought in students from all over the world, and they’ve really had their impact and their

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imprint on the city, and the arts industry, which is fantastic; so I think that really shows. (Lv40) While one participant referred to ‘the art student clique’ (Lv33) inhibiting the development of grassroots arts, others viewed the graduates who stayed on after studying in Liverpool as creating a ‘vibrant amateur scene’ (Lv31) in drama and art, encouraging more experimental work than might otherwise be the case. The positive relationship worked both ways, with ‘the culture and the arts scene, and the nightlife’ (Lv25) attracting students to the city, and some local residents then choosing to attend performances and events on the university and college campuses, though with some frustration that these were not well advertised: ‘I know it’s the kind of place that they do put on performances, but I can’t say I’ve got any sort of knowledge of what kind of thing they put on’ (Lv23). Like the other cities, Liverpool was perceived to be lacking in some areas of arts provision, including contemporary dance and arthouse films, though the sense that ‘it would not be difficult to do something every day’ (Lv38) was also present. There were complaints that events were not sufficiently well advertised ‘in more public spaces, if you like, not just in the arts places themselves’ (Lv15), which felt linked to the sense of free and accessible participation underpinning the cultural ethos of the city: Culture’s always about immersion, but also doing and getting involved, you know, I’m not really one to stand and look and go, ‘Oh that’s a pretty picture’, actually, that’s why I think Liverpool’s quite special in that respect, we do have immersive and very hands-­on activities as well. (Lv35)

4.2  How and why London is different The question ‘What do you think of your city as a place for the arts?’ landed quite differently with participants in London, where gaps in provision were less readily identified, but challenges of access, diversity and navigating the plethora of arts opportunities were quickly brought into the conversation. London residents were aware of this difference from the rest of the country, feeling ‘lucky’, ‘privileged’ and ‘totally spoilt’ to live in a city where ‘you could go to, I think, a matinee and an evening performance and an exhibition in the morning, every day of every week for the whole year and still not have done it’ (Ld06). This brought obvious pleasure to participants, even while making many of them aware of the limitations of their time, budget and available information: ‘it’s a very rich landscape. The downside of that is it’s very easy to get into a rut’ (Ld19). Audience Agency analysis shows that London audiences are also different from elsewhere in the country, including a high proportion of ‘metroculturals’, highly educated professionals who are frequent attenders with a

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‘high degree of confidence in their own opinions and tastes when it comes to culture’1 and likely to seek out new work. However, understanding of London audiences is dominated by box office data from large venues: in the Snapshot Audience Report produced by Audiences London (2012), contemporary dance was the only visibly contemporary art form in the survey of household ticket spend and accounted for only 4% of households in 2009/10. Engaging with the contemporary arts in London was a process of selection and choice: more than in other cities, there were strongly individual narratives of preferences, criteria and opportunity-­seeking rather than loyalty to specific venues or a sense of belonging to a regular audience. London arts attenders narrowed down their selections from the ‘amazing’ range of options in a variety of ways: some of these were practical, including price, location and transport options; some were led by preference for venue, art form and type of experience; and some involved moral and ethical choices to support particular kinds of organisations or to address diversity and equality of access. However, the residual frustration of not being fully informed about events was widespread: one regular theatregoer was frustrated that multiple social media links did not avoid the problem of ‘a show that comes and goes and I don’t even know it’s come and gone. How is that happening?’ (Ld16). The reliance on prior knowledge and existing connections into the arts world for all but the most heavily advertised events was frequently mentioned: ‘you have to be more of a connoisseur in London. You have to know where to look and you have to have quite a developed idea of what you’re after to go and find it’ (Ld38). Those who had come from international cities to London found the scene harder to navigate than, for example, Athens, which is ‘not as big as London, [so] you don’t have to research widely’ (Ld34), and Toronto, where ‘there was like a set of promoters or a set of venues’ which could be easily followed (Ld33). London audience experience was therefore notably different from other cities in its sense of filtering information rather than being sought out by venues, and each respondent told a personal story of how they navigated a cultural offer that was always going to be too much to fit into their lives. The cost of arts attendance was of course a strong decision-­making factor in every city, though many London respondents spoke positively of the access to cheap or free events in an otherwise expensive city. The mindset of ‘prefer[ring] to pay less and go more often’ (Ld07) was widespread in theatre attendance, but effort, insight and connections were needed to gain early-­bird or on-­the-­door discounts (Pitts, Price,  & Freshwater, forthcoming). Memberships of venues and organisations were also used to reduce ticket costs and obtain priority booking for theatre and ballet shows which would otherwise become quickly sold out (see also Price, Perry, Mantell, Trinder, & Pitts, 2019): There wasn’t much choice [of seats], ’cos I didn’t go online until, I don’t know, midday as opposed to 9am. A lot of the seats had gone. So, I just think, well, if you’re not a friend, how do you get these things? (Ld36)

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Frustration with having to book well in advance for some events was a feature of London attendance not seen to the same extent in other cities, and several respondents noted this difference in city arts experience: Anything good is booked-­up way in advance. You can’t just go, ‘Oh, what should we do tonight? Oh, there’s a thing on’, . . . ’cos anything good . . . you had to have bought your tickets months and months and months ago. Whereas . . . my guess is perhaps in Liverpool it’s possible to turn up on the night because it’s just, everything’s a little bit smaller. . . . We went to that, that Nonclassical thing. I couldn’t see the last act because it’s in Dalston [so] it was an hour-­and-­a-­half to get home. (Ld27) As this quote illustrates, location and transport options were another distinguishing feature of London responses, and the challenges of relying on public transport to get home after an evening event: ‘getting back from the West End is easy but getting back from Shoreditch not so easy’ (Ld44). The observation that ‘a lot of Londoners don’t use London’ (Ld15) was a motivation to ‘take advantage of it’ (Ld06), and the vibrant arts scene was for some people a compensation for the pressures and busyness of London living: ‘we put up with all the rubbish and all the difficulties of living in London, we need to enjoy some of the benefits’ (Ld27). Knowledge of specific areas of London sometimes shaped arts engagement in positive ways, as in the plans to visit a gallery ‘close to home and I combine it with a walk in the park’ (Ld08) or ‘do a gig, and then visit some charity shops that I haven’t been to in a while’ (Ld11). However, more often the sense that ‘pretty much everywhere is an hour away’ (Ld28) was seen as an additional drain on time, funds and energy: Perhaps if I had triple the salary and could get taxis everywhere then, then I’d go out more but . . . especially the older I’m getting, you know, that’s more of a factor. I’m going, ‘God, how am I  going to get home from there? How do I get there, how do I get home?’ Because you have a lovely evening and then you spend . . . an hour or two on a bus with people vomiting on your shoes. It kind of sucks some of the joy out of the evening, I guess. (Ld27) Exceptions to this predicament came from those respondents who were not in full-­time work, including the recently retired enjoying the free travel of their Freedom Pass, and the consequent access to quieter daytime arts attendance, such as ‘the first showing of the day, that kind of like empty or nearly empty cinema experience’ (Ld20). Some respondents lamented the absence of more local arts provision, noting that suburban theatres were more limited in their programming, focusing on ‘lowest common denominator stuff . . . whereas if you’re in North London, you’ve got the intelligentsia popping down to the

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Almeida every fortnight’ (Ld12). Others noted that theatres out of the city centre had less support or publicity, and therefore, ‘most people don’t know that there is a perfectly functioning theatre that sits in the middle of Deptford. They don’t just belong in the centre of London or in rich places’ (Ld29). Strong views about whether or not to engage were expressed in relation to the West End, used as a shorthand for lavish, expensive productions that were felt to be ‘aimed at the tourists’ (Ld23), or attended as a special occasion treat: ‘every Christmas we’ll go as a family, and all of us love a musical’ (Ld36). If you go see something for example at the theatre in the West End or something, like a show that’s constantly running or something that’s very popular or an art exhibition at The Tate or something, I think often sometimes people will look down on that or feel that it’s basic or too easy. . . . You feel guilty about seeing something that’s too easy or too easily available (laughing). . . . Yeah, I think that’s something that we’re all trying as hipster children in London (laughing), trying to overcome. (Ld17) This quote highlights how the multiplicity of London arts events can make an attendance decision feel ‘wrong’, not just as a disappointing night out, but for the signals it sends about lifestyle and values. Meanwhile, a robust rebuttal of this concern came from a recent retiree who was perturbed by her friends’ theatre choices, since ‘Why would you go and see something that just depresses you? I like to be uplifted’ (Ld36). Having so much choice created its own dilemmas in ways that were not so visible in the other cities, and perhaps accounted for London participants’ fluency in articulating their attendance decisions in relation to personal, social and moral choices. The impossibility of gaining a comprehensive overview of arts provision in London fuelled the widespread assumption that ‘it’s really good for whatever your niche taste is’ (Ld35), alongside the sense (expressed variously as a frustration or a pleasure) that ‘there’s more stuff going on than I know about’ (Ld27). A  few participants acknowledged the contradiction inherent in assuming an extensive arts provision without being able to fully experience it: I think London’s amazing for broadening your experience of the arts, definitely. I think, you know, as I said, like, I know what I’m looking for and I can pretty much always find something. Um, and I don’t look for the other things, but I have to, kind of, admit that they, they must be as lively in those things because it’s so lively in the things that I’m looking for. (Ld30) The relationship with the city was therefore qualitatively different in London, compared to Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool, where many participants confidently, and sometimes proudly or defensively, expressed a view about how and why their city was distinctive as a place for the arts. In the regional cities,

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attending an arts venue was often an expression of loyalty and support, as well as a cultural choice; this contrasts with the London experience of events being booked up well in advance, which means that audience members are to some extent in competition with each other, and if they do not attend, somebody else will. Philanthropic motivation for arts attendance was therefore aimed more towards supporting emerging and underrepresented artists (see Section 5.3) or turning up for less mainstream events, where the need for an audience might be more apparent, often the case in the contemporary arts. Our aim in comparing London with the other three cities is to highlight differences in audience experience, rather than to perpetuate any kind of hierarchy of provision: some participants were sensitive to the ‘London-­y conceit that I’m assuming that . . . there’s more of everything and it’s better in London’ (Ld27), while responses in the other cities noted that ‘across the arts, I’d have London at the top of course, ’cos they’ve got all the money’ (Bh47) (cf. Stark, Gordon, & Powell, 2013). The diversity of arts provision in London is undoubtedly greater, but our participants’ narratives showed that this context for arts engagement changes the experience at the point of decision-­making more than within the arts event itself. Whereas in the other cities, regular attenders at a particular venue will see the ‘same faces’ (Bh38), this was unusual in all but the smallest London venues. Any sense of connection came through membership and repeat attendance, and large galleries and theatres, particularly, appeared to work against the feeling of audience community that was valued by participants in other cities. Similarly, the willingness to travel was a different decision in the capital and elsewhere: the ‘pretty much an hour’ (Ld28) to an event was roughly the equivalent of a train journey from Liverpool to Manchester, but these were viewed by some as a necessity and an impossibility, respectively. Orion Brook’s study of opera audiences in London notes: If distance has a significant effect for opera attenders, where audiences are notoriously socially stratified, and in London, where all areas have good access to opera venues, how much more impact might it have for other art forms and regions? (Brook, 2013, p. 104) London illustrates, even more strongly than the other cities, that place matters in audience experience, not just in what is available, but in how arts events fit into the rest of attenders’ lives.

4.3 Arriving, belonging and visiting: relationships to place Having made the case for understanding audience engagement as being situated within a particular place rather than solely occurring between the individual and the event, this section probes more deeply into how the arts contribute to relationship with place.

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The willingness to travel was strikingly different in the four cities, with Liverpool residents the most inclined to view their city as being self-­sufficient for the arts, while Bristol audiences readily included Bath, Cardiff and London as part of their arts ecology. The sense of proximity to London was stronger in Bristol than in Birmingham, despite similar journey times (and cheaper train fares from Birmingham). Both cities have in recent years seen an influx of former London residents (Office for National Statistics, 2019; Tapper, 2019), and some of our participants compared the lifestyle choices of being in or out of the capital: We go to London all the time. London is as big as everybody says. It’s true. It’s big, it’s impersonal, it’s dirty, it’s noisy, right? Living there? No, no I don’t wanna do that. But what I wanna do is to go six, seven times a year [and] just spend two days just soaking it all up. . . . Bristol is important to me. I love the city and it’s important to me on a day-­to-­day basis. But because I’m so close, because me and my partner are so close to London, it’s just part of what we do. (Br44) Our Bristol arts organisation partners were aware of the need to cater to the ‘Bristol experience’ sought by these newer residents, but some participants were concerned about the effect of the rising population of ex-­Londoners on the arts engagement of less socially advantaged locals (see Section 4.1.2). In Birmingham, one participant noted similarly that ‘Birmingham is starting to attract loads and loads of metropolitan people who come to live here but commute to London [for] work’ (Bh33) but felt that the arts scene was not sufficiently prepared for an ambitious change of audience demand: If any of [the council] had ever been to the South Bank and seen how alive that is, or ever been to the Barbican and seen how alive that is, and then come and looked at the [Birmingham] library, they’d have thought, ‘Hang on, what can we do with this?’ But no. (Bh33) Comparisons with London were woven throughout the accounts of audience engagement in the other three cities: sometimes these were expressed defensively, in reference to the greater investment in London; sometimes favourably, as in the assertions that all three regional cities were ‘much more friendly here than London is’ (Bh35); and sometimes with a comfortable description of their city as ‘one of the best cities bar London that I’ve been in for cultural stuff’ (Br22). Perceptions of the size of a city fuelled these attitudes to how much it could be expected to provide: London, most obviously, was ‘massive’ and its arts provision therefore assumed to be comprehensive, while Bristol was variously described as ‘huge’ (Br39) and ‘very small’ (Br05), by residents making implicit comparisons with other places they had lived and worked. Birmingham’s

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(somewhat disputed) status as ‘the second largest city’ in the UK was asserted by several participants, though often coupled with a criticism about how this did not translate into recognition or support for its arts scene: I used to say: ‘What do you want to hear? Tell me what you want to hear and I’ll tell you where to go’ because it used to get me really cross, even in my early twenties, I would get cross with newcomers, where I worked, we used to get graduates in, just on a six-­month posting. And they would be going ‘Groan, groan, I’m in Birmingham for six months, I’m going to die’, and I used to get just furious, get my little soap box out and say ‘What do you want to do? All right, you can’t go to lots of night clubs but what else do you want to do? And what music do you want to hear?’ (Bh39) As demonstrated here, new arrivals in a city offer a particular perspective on the arts scene, and our interviews included several examples of this, including people who had moved between the four cities in this project. A change of location could provide critical distance, as in the description of Bristol as ‘the most segregated city in England’ (Ld43) by someone who had recently left, which amplified the concerns about diversity expressed in the city interviews (see Section 4.1.2): There is basically two scenes of poetry, on one side of the city there is like a little arts group for ethnic voices, but it’s a detriment in itself because they don’t expand, and they are very you know, within themselves, and they have their little hub and they don’t really allow other voices to come in. (Ld43) Conversely, a move away from London to Bristol had brought an unexpected realisation that there was cultural life outside the capital: [I’m] a bit embarrassed because I’d been living in London for about 12 or 13 years before that and I think I’d probably become really insular to what art was and that everything good was bred and delivered in London. (Br34) In each of the cities, there were examples of participants learning to navigate the arts scene in a new place, finding themselves within or outside ‘that little clique of people [who know] who’s doing what’ (Lv04). Concerns were also expressed by more established residents about whether their city was sufficiently inclusive and accessible for the arts, as in the case of the London participant who defined the cultural scene as ‘egalitarian’ based on her own experience, but reflected later in her interview on whether this was widely felt: I guess I wonder a little bit about, um, how accessible it feels to people who aren’t somehow connected to the scene or the community, because,

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you know, I said earlier, like, I don’t feel like it’s exclusionary, like, you know, ‘You’re the wrong person to be here, why are you here?’ But I  guess that can be a feeling that people have, especially when they’re new to the city. (Ld30) How an arts scene is perceived by ‘incomers’ sheds new light on the connections and networks that form within a city, and shows how the ‘cross-­ pollination’ (Br13) that occurs when arts organisations ‘all connect to each other and support each other and partner up’ (Lv22) is in itself a valuable tool for audience engagement. Some of the highly engaged arts attenders in our study cited the arts as a substantial factor in their decision to move to or stay in their chosen city, particularly in relation to feeling compelled to stay in London: A fantastic selection of galleries, all sorts of different things, something for everybody. Museums are fantastic, the parks are fantastic. London is . . . I  couldn’t.  .  .  . Everyone says to me, ‘When are you gonna move now you’ve stopped working all the time?’ You know, ‘When are you gonna move down to the south coast to be with us?’ and I think, ‘God, I’d have to leave London. I couldn’t bear it.’ (Ld12) The same passion of feeling that they couldn’t live anywhere else was expressed by several other London residents, whereas some life decisions had been more accidental: ‘I never intended to stay in Birmingham, I  came to college, and never intended to stay, and that’s . . . nearly 30 years ago, so obviously something is happening here’ (Bh09). Our London participants made the widest range of comparisons with other places, having previously lived in cities including Toronto and Athens and in more rural locations where they faced different challenges in accessing the arts: I lived in the Lake District and what used to happen was at that point, stuff would tour, occasionally Northern Opera would tour, and they would basically take [over] the local leisure centre . . . and it would be heaving. It would be selling out in five minutes flat, because nothing came otherwise. (Ld39) For the most part, therefore, the participants in our study appeared to feel well matched to the arts offer in their city, either because it fulfilled their cultural needs or because they felt able to make a difference through their own arts practices: I’ve stayed in Birmingham for this long now, if this is 12 or 13 years since moving here to study. It’s partly for me [about] being a part of these

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things that I could see growing up in the city, and kind of saying ‘This is great, this is something I wanna be a part of, this moves the culture forward in the city.’ (Bh15) Our participants were of course self-­selecting, and so the accounts of each city are biased towards the views of engaged arts attenders, but they show nonetheless how closely the narratives of place are intertwined with perspectives on arts provision. In each city, some participants sought to explain the ‘uniqueness’ of the arts scene, even while highlighting in doing so the metanarratives of access, diversity and gentrification that were present across locations. This is further evidence that viewing audience experience as a straightforward relationship between ticket-­purchaser, art form and venue (to take one set of variables) overlooks the wider context for attendance in ways that hide important factors in arts engagement. Another perspective on how participants navigated the arts in their cities came from the choices they made on behalf of their visitors, often seeking experiences that were distinctive to that city or were out of their own normal attendance patterns: My brother and his family were over from South Africa before Christmas, so I went to . . . London – real London kind of . . . Shaftesbury Avenue, yeah, which I  never would usually do. That was great, actually. I  really enjoyed it, you know, eating in that area – Soho – and then going to the theatre felt really ‘London’, and I really don’t do that, usually. (Ld15) ‘[Going] to exhibitions’ (Br10) was also a favoured activity with visitors, sometimes as a more deliberate activity than the more regular ‘popping in’ of gallery attendance: ‘we’ll probably go to the Victoria and Albert and then we’ll probably go to the Royal Academy, so we’ll do two in one day’ (Ld42), and having visitors was often the only reason to return to permanent exhibitions that participants had already seen. Despite this willingness to behave like visitors for a day, some strong antipathy to arts events aimed at the tourists was expressed in several cities, and particularly in Liverpool. Here, as in London, it seemed to be a shorthand for events that were judged to be commercial or inauthentic and which therefore distorted the perceptions of the city or the art form: It all comes back to chasing the pound, doesn’t it? It all comes back to . . . you are guaranteed to get a money turnover by giving tourists what they want to see. Tourists want to see psychedelic art, anything linked to the Beatles, you know, that sort of thing; tourists want to see the Antony Gormleys; tourists want to see . . . you know, all that – that sort of thing, which is famous to Liverpool. (Lv40)

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The recently developed docks area of Liverpool, home to Tate Modern and a frequent stop for the cruise ships that visit the city (87 ships visited in 2019 according to the Liverpool Echo (Rice, 2018)), was a focus for the ambivalence over cultural investment undertaken with an eye to the tourist market. A comparison of attitudes to the Tate galleries in London and Liverpool show that while opinion was divided in both cities between appreciation of the quality of the exhibitions and discomfort at the often crowded setting, only in Liverpool was the ‘bourgeois feel’ (Lv03) perceived as a poor fit to the city and the investment criticised as a distraction from local priorities: That money would have been better spent, you know, trying to house people who couldn’t afford it. Um, but I suppose the retort to that is, the idea is that you put the Tate in Liverpool and it would bring people who wouldn’t normally be interested in art into the Tate, but I don’t think that washes, really, to be honest. (Lv17) These are tricky debates to arbitrate, since ‘that money’ is unlikely to have been spent on housing if Tate Liverpool had not been built, but this highlights a concern about investment in the arts that underpins discussions of whether events and organisations are worthwhile and sufficiently inclusive (see Dobson, 2018, on similar attitudes to the funding of public green spaces in cities). Finally, arts attendance was a feature of holiday travel for several participants, both in shaping the choice of destination to coincide with a festival (Ld32) and as a way of exploring a new place through its galleries and performances. Overseas arts experience could be about broadening experience, getting to know a place or affirming impressions of their home city: I go to many cities around the world and I always try and see their art collections and it’s good to compare how London, you know, how it stacks up against other major cities and I think we’re pretty at the top end of it. (Ld41) Being on holiday abroad often prompted participants to take part in cultural activities that they would not consider at home because they were quintessential activities to do in that place: When I’m on holiday, for example, I will keep an open mind to what’s happening. . . . We went to the Bolshoi Ballet when we were in Moscow, because you had to do it, and I really enjoyed it. When we were in New York, we thought, ‘We must go to the Met Opera.’ (Lv32) This attitude, perfectly summed up by the idiom ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, was most commonly associated with highbrow cultural activities, such as attending the ballet in Moscow, the opera in Verona or classical art

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galleries in Paris. Experiencing a city as a tourist therefore mitigated some of the barriers and sense of exclusion that were often perceived for high arts events.

4.4  Conclusions: situated audiences Conducting research across four diverse UK cities has served to highlight the ways in which place shapes each stage of audience engagement, creating a new understanding of ‘situated audiences’ who are affected by geographical relationships beyond the individual venues that they attend. Navigating an arts scene depends on a high level of insider knowledge and prior experience, and newcomers to the arts scene often lack the necessary cultural capital to find attractive arts events and secure affordable tickets, particularly in London (see also Price et al., 2019). Arts organisations would benefit from connecting in ways that reflect how audiences engage with the arts, such as collaborating to suggest ways of ‘making a day’ out of arts attendance and being generous with audiences by sharing other events that they might enjoy through reciprocal promotion (see Section 5.1.3). Collaboration and public arts events can be a declaration of inclusivity and foster confidence in the arts provision of a city. The legacy of art events, organisations or key individuals can continue to shape the perception of arts in the city for many years afterwards. Figures like Simon Rattle in Birmingham can put a city on the map; nevertheless the tourist-­centred exhibition of the Beatles in Liverpool warns of the dangers of nostalgia for keeping an arts scene locked in the past. In these two cities, perceptions of the city’s poor reputation across the country led to participants wanting to support and advocate for the arts, while the perception of London as a thriving arts scene also prompted engagement through a desire to ‘make the most’ of what was on offer. Arts attendance is therefore shaped not only by arts provision but by participants’ cultural confidence in the arts scene, whether it is something that needs to be fostered or is in healthy abundance and therefore does not need their support.

Note 1 www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-­spectrum/metroculturals

References Arts Council England. (2018b). Bristol visual arts review. Retrieved from www.artscouncil.org.uk/ sites/default/files/download-­file/ACE217%20Bristol%20Visual%20Arts%20Review.V7.pdf Audiences London. (2012). Snapshot audience report: Sharing and comparing audience intelligence key indicators for performing arts venues in London. Retrieved from http://culturehive.co.uk/ wp-­content/uploads/2013/04/Snapshot-­Audience-­Report-­2009-­10.pdf Barrett, M. (2016). ‘Our place’: Class, the theatre audience and the Royal Court Liverpool (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/80890/1/WRAP_THESIS_ Barrett_2016.pdf Behr, A., Brennan, M., Cloonan, M., Frith, S., & Webster, E. (2016). Live concert performance: An ecological approach. Rock Music Studies, 3, 5–23. doi:10.1080/19401159.20 15.1125633

76  Cities for the arts Boland, P. (2010). ‘Capital of culture – you must be having a laugh!’ Challenging the official rhetoric of Liverpool as the 2008 European Cultural Capital. Social & Cultural Geography, 11, 627–645. doi:10.1080/14649365.2010.508562 Boland, P., Murtagh, B., & Shirlow, P. (2019). Fashioning a City of Culture: ‘Life and place changing’ or ‘12 month party’? International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25, 246–265. doi:10. 1080/10286632.2016.1231181 Brook, O. (2013). Reframing models of arts attendance: Understanding the role of access to a venue. The case of opera in London. Cultural Trends, 22, 97–107. doi:10.1080/095 48963.2013.783175 Bryson, J. R. (2007). Arts, dance, cultural infrastructure, and city regeneration: Knowledge, audience development, networks, and conventions, and the relocation of a Royal Ballet company from London to Birmingham. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-­Norwegian Journal of Geography, 61, 98–110. doi:10.1080/00291950701553848 Campbell, P., Cox, T., & O’Brien, D. (2017). The social life of measurement: How methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration. Journal of Cultural Economy, 10, 49–62. doi:10.1080/17530350.2016.1248474 Cohen, S. (2012). Live music and urban landscape: Mapping the beat in Liverpool. Social Semiotics, 22, 587–603. doi:10.1080/10350330.2012.731902 Cox, T., & O’Brien, D. (2012). The ‘scouse wedding’ and other myths: Reflections on the evolution of a ‘Liverpool model’ for culture-­led urban regeneration. Cultural Trends, 21, 93–101. doi:10.1080/09548963.2012.674749 Culture, Place and Policy Institute (CPPI). (2019). Cultural transformations: The impacts of Hull UK City of Culture 2017: Main evaluation findings and reflections. Hull: University of Hull. Dobson, J. (2018). From contest to context: Urban green space and public policy. People, Place and Policy, 12, 72–83. doi:10.3351/ppp.2018.3824435278 Evans, G. (2005). Measure for measure: Evaluating the evidence of culture’s contribution to regeneration. Urban Studies, 42, 959–983. doi:10.1080/00420980500107102 Garcia, B. (2004). Urban regeneration, arts programming and major events: Glasgow 1990, Sydney 2000 and Barcelona, 2004. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10, 103–118. doi:10.80/1028663042000212355 Garcia, B. (2005). Deconstructing the city of culture: The long-­term cultural legacies of Glasgow 1990. Urban Studies, 42, 841–868. doi:10.1080/00420980500107532 Garrido, S., & Macritchie, J. (2018). Audience engagement with community music performances: Emotional contagion in audiences of ‘pro-­am’ orchestra in suburban Sydney. Musicae Scientiae. doi:10.1177/1029864918783027 Gomes, P., & Librero-­Cano, A. (2018). Evaluating three decades of the European Capital of Culture programme: A difference-­in-­differences approaches. Journal of Cultural Economics, 42, 57–73. doi:10.1007/s10824-­016-­9281-­x Griffiths, R., Bassett, K.,  & Smith, I. (1999). Cultural policy and the cultural economy in Bristol. Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, 14, 257–264. doi:10.1080/02690949908726496 Grimley, T. (2014). Symphony hall: A dream realised. Birmingham: Performances Birmingham. Gross, J.,  & Pitts, S. (2016). Audiences for the contemporary arts: Exploring varieties of participation across art forms in Birmingham, UK. Participations: Journal of Audience  & Reception Studies, 13(1), 4–23. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2013/ Issue%201/2.pdf Holden, J. (2015). The ecology of culture. Retrieved from https://ahrc.ukri.org/documents/ project-­reports-­and-­reviews/the-­ecology-­of-­culture/ Leonard, M., & Strachan, R. (Eds.). (2010). The beat goes on: Liverpool, popular music and the changing city. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Cities for the arts 77 Liu, Y.-­D. (2016). Cultural event and urban regeneration: Lessons from Liverpool as the 2008 European capital of culture. European Review, 24, 159–176. doi:10.1017/ S1062798715000265 Liu, Y.-­D. (2017). Quality of life as event legacy: An evaluation of Liverpool as the 2008 European capital of culture. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 12, 653–670. doi:10.1007/ s11482-­016-­9481-­8 Mooney, G. (2004). Cultural policy as urban transformation? Critical reflections on Glasgow, European city of culture. Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, 19, 327–340. doi:10.1080/0269094042000286837 O’Brien, D. (2010). ‘No cultural policy to speak of ’  – Liverpool 2008. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, 2, 113–128. doi:10.1080/19407963.2010.482271 O’Sullivan, T. (2009). All together now: A symphony orchestra audience as a consuming community. Consumption Markets & Culture, 12, 209–223. doi:10.1080/10253860903063220 Office for National Statistics. (2019). Population estimates for the UK, England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: Mid-­2018. Retrieved from www.ons.gov.uk/people populationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/ annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2018#local-­population-­change Pitts, S. E. (2005). What makes an audience? Investigating the roles and experiences of listeners at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 86, 257–269. doi:10.1093/ml/gci035 Pitts, S. E., Price, S., & Freshwater, H. (Forthcoming). ‘I’d see anything’: Exploring potential fandom in highly engaged theatre audiences. In K. Sedgman (Ed.), Introduction to theatre fandom. Scheduled for publication in 2020 with University of Iowa Press. Pitts, S. E., & Spencer, C. P. (2008). Loyalty and longevity in audience listening: Investigating experiences of attendance at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 89, 227–238. doi:10.1093/ml/gcm084 Price, S. M. (2017). Risk and reward in classical music concert attendance: Investigating the engagement of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ audiences with a regional symphony orchestra in the UK (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16628/ Price, S. M., Perry, R., Mantell, O., Trinder, J., & Pitts, S. (2019). Spontaneity and planning in arts attendance: Insights from qualitative interviews and the audience finder database. Cultural Trends, 28(2–3), 220–238. doi:10.1080/09548963.2019.1617943 Reason, M., & Garcia, B. (2007). Approaches to the newspaper archive: Content analysis and press coverage of Glasgow’s year of culture. Media, Culture & Society, 29, 304–331. doi:10.1177/0163443707074261 Rice, E. M. (2018, August  13). Cruise ships you can see in Liverpool in 2019. Liverpool Echo. Retrieved from www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-­o n/whats-­o n-­n ews/ see-­cruise-­ships-­liverpool-­2018-­12422442 Sound Diplomacy. (2019). The music cities manual: How music increases economic, social and cultural growth in your city. Retrieved from www.sounddiplomacy.com/our-­insights/music­cities-­manual Stark, P., Gordon, C., & Powell, D. (2013). Rebalancing our cultural capital. Retrieved from www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/rocc/Rebalancing_FINAL_3mb.pdf Tapper, J. (2019, June 29). Tired of London: Thousands flee capital for a quieter life. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2019/jun/29/tired-­of-­london-­ thousands-­flee-­capital-­for-­a-­quieter-­life Tommarchi, E., Hansen, L. E., & Bianchini, F. (2018). Problematising the question of participation in capitals of culture. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 15(2), 154–169. Retrieved from www.participations.org/Volume%2015/Issue%202/10.pdf Warner, S. (2011). ‘You only sing when you’re winning’: Football factions and rock rivalries in Manchester and Liverpool. Soccer and Society, 12, 58–73. doi:10.1080/14660970.2011.530468

5 Art forms, venues and audience decision-­making Navigating the cultural ecology

The UACA research project began with a single question: is there crossover between audiences for the different kinds of contemporary arts? (See Section 1.2.) Large-­scale quantitative research, such as the Taking Part Survey1 and box office data collation done by the Audience Agency, demonstrates that audiences certainly do cross over between art forms, but interpreting this data soon complicates the original question: how often does an audience member have to attend two organisations to be considered to be ‘crossing over’? Does the term ‘crossover’ imply engagement with different art forms or only arts organisations? Furthermore, is it possible to reconcile crossover between radically different sizes of organisations? For example, in Birmingham, a large venue such as Birmingham Hippodrome sees over half a million visitors each year, whereas theatre company Stan’s Cafe has created a production which is only ever seen by one person at a time;2 how can crossover between their audiences be meaningfully quantified? Finally, is ‘crossover’ an umbrella term for all forms of audience overlap, or does it imply progress and audience migration from one art form to many? We began to question the significance of the idea of ‘crossover’ for understanding audience experience, using qualitative interviewing to investigate the way audiences engage with different art forms, their perceptions and preconceptions and the different attitudes and knowledge they bring into each form. In the very first interview in the national phase of the project, a high-­frequency theatre attender vividly described how differently she engaged with dance: Dance I  really rarely see. Yeah, that feels very luxurious to me because I feel quite outside of it. So if I go and see, like, ballet or if I go and see contemporary dance, it’s like I’ll get dressed up and it’ll feel like more of an event. . . . When I go to dance, it feels like ‘Oh, I’m just treating myself ’ . . . like I’m just going to have a nice time. . . . Whereas, I’ll go and see, like, theatre out the back of a van! (Ld01) In theatre, this participant actively embraced the unknown, the untested, experimental and off-­the-­wall works, which she would happily fit in to multiple evenings after work each week, alone or with whichever friend was available. In contrast, her engagement with dance was much less frequent, reserved for

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special occasions with her family, returning time and time again to well-­known works. While theatre is her comfort zone, ballet leaves her feeling unsure if she has fully understood or engaged with it. On any customer database, this person would look like two completely different attenders, attending very different types of programme, probably paying vastly different prices, deciding to attend for very different reasons and at different levels of frequency. This chapter discusses the ways in which audiences approach each art form, with a particular focus on the decision to attend and the ways in which participants navigate their local cultural ecology. The term ‘ecology’ has received much criticism in recent years following its adoption by Arts Council England (2014) in reaction to the Rebalancing our Cultural Capital report (Stark, Gordon, & Powell, 2013). ‘Ecology’ in policymaking has acted as something of a smokescreen for inequalities in the sector (Doeser, 2014), a term designed to draw attention to the richness of arts on offer at grassroots and publicly funded levels, without truly addressing the troubling question of which of these arts benefits from subsidy (Gross & Wilson, 2018). While we recognise the danger of using this term, we have found it useful for two reasons. First, it puts place at the centre of our analysis (cf. Behr, Brennan, Cloonan, Frith,  & Webster, 2016), foregrounding our focus on exploring the arts offering across whole cities. Second, and more importantly, ‘ecology’ encapsulates the way in which audiences experience the arts in their city, as a series of interconnected organisations through which they navigate, deciding which to engage with and support. This chapter considers the ways in which audience members select from the various cultural offerings that are available to them, comparing and contrasting engagement across different art forms. Very little work has been done previously to compare experiences of different media (Carnwath & Brown, 2014), and differences between art forms are generally downplayed in favour of showing common patterns across cultural consumption (Brown & Novak-­Leonard, 2013; Radbourne, Glow, & Johanson, 2013). Our previous studies have shown how new attenders use their knowledge and experience in other art forms to help interpret unfamiliar experiences (Pitts, 2016; Pitts  & Gross, 2017), but since sociological studies show that today’s arts audiences often engage with multiple art forms on a regular basis (Peterson  & Kern, 1996), this project offered an unparalleled opportunity to examine holistically how different art forms are experienced by individual participants.

5.1  Relationship between art forms The concept of crossover in audiences highlights the multiplicity of ‘ways in’ to any arts event, with our interviews being striking in showing the many connections that audiences could make with a theatre production: Why I  go to a performance depends on quite a few things really. How much time I have got, nasty to say but how much it costs, who the author is, who the production is by, and who the cast are. (Lv21)

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The story itself might be the main appeal, whether that be because the play or the original novel were known to the participant or they could be attracted to the subject matter, either because the idea of the production appealed or because it was commenting on something that chimed with the participants’ world views. Participants could be drawn in by famous or well-­respected actors that they had grown familiar with through previous theatre productions, through TV and film (though the many drawn in by celebrity fandom to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet or Martin Freeman’s Richard III have been criticised for, as Sedgman (2017b) describes it: engaging ‘for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways’) or because their reputations preceded them. Directors and producers could also be an attraction; while this required more specialist knowledge, again there was some crossover with TV and film that meant theatre professionals were somewhat more common knowledge than their counterparts in dance, for example. While the decision to attend theatre could be just as easily influenced by the presenting institution, venue, price and availability as all other art forms, theatre productions were an important part of participants’ decision-­making, since an unusual, site-­specific, political or modernised version of a play could add something new to even the most familiar work. Theatre appeared to offer myriad routes in for audience members, in stark contrast to the classical music research we have previously conducted, where the works programmed dominate the decision-­ making process (Price, 2017). Additionally, the fact that theatre productions can run for a number of weeks whereas classical music concerts are often not repeated gave participants a chance to hear recommendations from friends or read reviews. The influence of TV and film on theatre drew our attention to the ways in which accessibility in each art form was influenced by its role in participants’ everyday lives. The way in which people engaged with live music was shaped by their engagement with recorded music, with participants often attending gigs with one of two aims: to see an artist with whom they are already very familiar or to discover a new artist, potentially following up with digital listening after the performance: ‘I get the programme and read a little and then, “Okay. Let’s give that one a go.” . . . If I really like them, I buy the album’ (Lv10). While this was most prominent in music, similar relationships could be seen in all art forms. For theatre, this was most strongly linked to TV, as actors had become well known to participants: ‘I go to the theatre . . . probably once a year . . . either a play that I have known or one that I’d wanted to see, or something with somebody famous in it’ (Br01). However, there was also a strong link with reading and literature, as participants were introduced to certain stories or even scripts through reading: ‘I have seen Othello in Manchester, that was when I was studying A Level English language and literature, and that was amazing. . . . I just loved it’ (Lv05). While TV was also an influence on dance, here participants described being exposed to the art form in general rather than to specific works or performers, through reality TV programmes such as Britain’s Got Talent or Strictly Come Dancing (Lv40): The only time I  really saw [dance] was on something like X Factor, or Britain’s Got Talent, so in that case, like it was amazing the first time you

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saw it [but then] it’s just like, ‘Oh ok, yeah, you dance and that’s great and what was the other thing?’ (Br45) For visual art, the manifestation in everyday life was slightly different, in that participants (typically those who were far less engaged) would often criticise a piece by saying that they would not hang it in their home: ‘I’m sure there is skill in modern art but I absolutely don’t get it. Some of it – well, it was ugly as well. It wasn’t something I’d ever want to put on my wall’ (Ld36). Familiar stories could provide another way in to works across art forms, since a strong and accessible subject matter, particularly one that resonated with the participants’ social interests, could encourage participants to take a chance on an arts event they would not normally consider: We came [to Watershed] to see I, Daniel [Blake]. (Br39) Oh, Daniel Blake, yeah. That was really interesting. That’s quite a personal thing because we’re both in the benefits system, so it’s like . . . yeah, far too real. (Br38) Indeed, this preference for works with a clear narrative provides one reason as to why theatre was generally engaged with on a far greater level than dance. Theatre was typically seen as more accessible, having a clear topic and storyline, whereas the emotional expression of dance without concrete meaning or syntax was far harder for many participants to engage with without having had a background in dance themselves: ‘I can’t really say I go to tonnes of dance to be honest. . . . I quite like a storyline, so [contemporary dance] is not always that satisfying’ (Ld38). This was echoed in the challenges faced by some participants in engaging with orchestral music: [The works in a contemporary music concert] didn’t have lyrics. I suppose that’s why . . . yeah, that’s probably why I was less enamoured with that music, really. . . . Funnily enough, the stuff I said that I liked was [when] the guy told an interesting story about how he’d gone about compiling this music and composing it. (Ld38) Whether work was abstract or narrative most strongly influenced reception to works in the performing arts, whereas the ability to walk away from disliked works in a gallery setting seemed to contribute to participants being on the whole more receptive to abstract visual art. Our pilot study in Birmingham found that free outdoor events and festivals were often a site of new arts experiences, because the ability to leave at any time made for a low-­r isk environment, meaning that the performance setting of the arts event influenced participants’ willingness to try something new.

Art forms, venues and decision-­making 83 5.1.1  Performance conventions

The performance conventions within each art form strongly impacted on the ways in which participants engaged with live arts, the most significant difference being between the performing arts and visual arts. The long opening hours of galleries, which in the UK often have free entry, meant that participants could ‘drop in’ for as long or short a visit as they desired. They were also free to return to the gallery repeatedly, giving additional opportunities to see works either in lengthy exhibitions or in permanent collections, although this was something that only the most dedicated gallery visitors really did: ‘I don’t mind going to the same exhibition a couple of times . . . even if you’ve been once, you can see something again or that you missed out’ (Ld42). When temporary exhibitions were on for a long time, it was easy not to prioritise and so to end up rushing on the last few days to get there. [Visual art] is what I least go to, which considering you have places here, places with exhibitions that are often free to go to and are on for about six months. But, then sometimes that is the problem, I feel like a play or a gig, it’s there, it’s a night, if you want to go to it you are going to it. The number of times you think, ‘Oh yeah, we should totally go to this exhibition, well we have got six months, its fine, we’ll think about this in a month when there is more free time’, which never, ever happens. (Br16) Galleries with permanent exhibitions that rarely changed or where the only temporary exhibitions charged an entrance fee could mean that there was little incentive to return to an art gallery, unless showing someone new around a city: ‘I’ve seen what’s in [there], all the ones that are there permanently, once, I wouldn’t go back and look at them again. It’s just not interesting to me’ (Lv23). It was not always easy to judge the size of an art gallery from its promotional materials, meaning participants in London, in particular, found it hard to decide whether a gallery would be large enough to be worth their visit: ‘If I haven’t been [to a gallery] before, I don’t know how big it is, so say it’s got the show on, they could be six, literally be six features’ (Ld19). Performing arts, on the other hand, tend to be ticketed and have a set start time; therefore, participants who bought tickets in advance had made a commitment to a particular time and place and would organise the rest of their activities around this attendance. Participants would talk about ‘making a night of it’, arranging their evening around their attendance and enhancing their experience by adding dinner or drinks: If we go to see a play or to a concert, we always start off in a restaurant, something to eat first, then we take in the show or whatever it is, and then we may or may not have a drink in the bar afterwards before getting the train home. (Lv28)

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Naturally there were different extremes of this: tickets for arena performances from big name pop stars would have to be bought far in advance, and therefore, participants would have to organise their lives around that date, a situation that made some events completely inaccessible for some participants, such as those with ill health, zero-­hours contracts or childcare responsibilities (Price, Perry, Mantell, Trinder, & Pitts, 2019). Some events did not fit neatly into categories of spontaneity or planning. While film screenings at the cinema require tickets and have a definite start time, the fact that there are multiple screenings of new releases every day mimicked the ease of access of galleries, in that participants could choose a time to suit them and often could just buy a ticket at the door: Every so often . . . we just happen to be in town for happenstance and we just went and did something and the easiest thing to do is say go to the cinema. . . . It would be good if you could sort of do that with other sort of art performance as well, so it’s quite an easy thing to do, the cinema. (Ld24) One-­off screenings of niche or old or alternative films were far more similar to performance events in the need to work around the demands of the performance: ‘we were gonna go see, um, Spirited Away, I think, as part of the Studio Ghibli season . . . but then it was sold out’ (Lv39). The attitudes to festivals as a site of audience risk-­taking, seen in our Birmingham and Bristol interviews, in particular (see Section 4.1), could be understood as putting performance events in a gallery-­style format, in which people can turn up at a time to suit them, free of charge (or at least having bought the ticket for the whole festival) and able to spend as much or as little time on that particular performance as they choose. The interviews also gave some indication that the act of either booking far in advance or spontaneously deciding to attend might then influence the way in which the arts event is experienced. As discussed in Price et al. (2019), participants differed in their desire to book in advance or buy on the door; some were excited by the prospect of having a drawer full of tickets (Lv28 and Lv29), while others much preferred to choose their arts attendance based on whether other plans had materialised and whether they had the energy to engage after ‘putting [events] in my diary and then realising that my eyes are too big for my belly and I can’t go to all of them!’ (Br28). Spontaneous attendance allowed people to select an event based on their current mood and what kind of experience they craved: ‘do I want to sit back and relax, or do I want to see something off the wall?’ (Ld05). There were very few examples of participants being in the wrong mood to engage with an arts event that they had booked a long time in advance, suggesting that having committed to an event, participants are able to put themselves in the right frame of mind, to psych themselves up to engage with an arts event. The anticipation of the event, depending on how long in advance the tickets were booked and their scarcity, could enhance and even guarantee a positive reaction ahead of time.

Art forms, venues and decision-­making 85 5.1.2  Context is the new genre

One of the key sites of value in this project is in being able to compare and contrast between how audiences engage with different art forms, but participants’ responses revealed the limitations of art form and genre boundaries as descriptions of the ways in which audiences engage with the arts. The most striking example of this was found when participants experienced difficulty in articulating their musical tastes, describing them as ‘eclectic’ (Ld10), ‘varied’ (Br11), or that ‘I like everything’ (Lv12). While these may be examples of performative open-­mindedness, it may also reflect a cultural shift towards mood-­and use-­ based listening, diminishing the importance of genre for defining musical tastes (Jenkins & Joven, 2018; Watson, 2015). Furthermore, due to the ubiquity of streaming and listening to music as an accompanying activity in everyday life, answers were vague, and participants tended not to see popular music as part of ‘arts and culture’ (although classical music certainly was) so were not primed to talk about it in the interviews: Although obviously music is an art form, to me, I don’t think of that when I think of the arts, really. I don’t know, it’s weird. I suppose music is so much part of . . . it’s regularly part of what I do and seek out. I wouldn’t use that to describe myself as an arty person. I think of an arty person as someone that goes to exhibitions all the time. That’s not what [I am]. (Lv23) Musical preference became easier to describe when participants were discussing their live music attendance and were easily able to articulate a preference for music arenas, concert halls, community halls, small gig venues, or pubs: ‘anywhere with fairy lights and cake!’ (Lv40). This led us to adopt the phrase ‘Context is the new genre’, from a report on a Spotify press event (Watson, 2015), as a shorthand for the ways in which audiences at times defined their tastes more by venues than art forms and genres. The place and presentation of arts events seemed to have more of an influence on participants’ arts selection than the artwork being performed, especially amongst younger participants. There was a sense that ‘this was a place in which interesting stuff happened’ or ‘this is the kind of place where people like me hang out’, and these sites of curation could become a shorthand for participants’ tastes, such as describing themselves as ‘more of a Tate Modern girl than a Tate Britain girl’ (Ld11) or characterising their musical tastes as being that which is played on Radio 6 Music (Br21) or ‘Late Junction’3 (Br09). While in London, theatre was typically delineated in terms of ‘West End’ or ‘fringe’ productions, in other cities or for other art forms, participants might express their taste through affinity with a particular venue: ‘I’ll go to everything that DanceXchange does’ (Bh33). Participants also described their tastes in terms of whether or not they included mainstream forms of programming. Work produced in more explicitly commercial spheres was seen as having distinctive characteristics, noted especially in West End or musical theatre (often used synonymously) and in

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Hollywood or blockbuster films. Some participants expressed intense dislike for musical theatre, describing it as ‘garish and tacky’ (Br14) or ‘vanilla’ (Br42) programming, implying that it is poor quality but inoffensive, designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. This was echoed in participants’ criticism of musical theatre productions being ‘too obviously money-­making ventures’ (Br41) and their personal gripes about the exorbitant price of tickets. When asked to discuss film viewing, participants frequently defined their tastes as being not blockbusters (‘I prefer arthouse cinema to mainstream, so if there’s a big blockbuster, that would be the one I won’t be going to (laughter)’ (Lv10)), while making an exception for some films emerging out of Hollywood: ‘The last thing I saw was Three Billboards [Outside Ebbing, Missouri] which I guess is, I don’t know if you would class that as a blockbuster?’ (Lv27). Participants therefore clarified that what they were looking for were films that did not fit a typical Hollywood mould, criticised for its ‘predictable’ plots (Lv39), its heteronormative romantic tropes (Ld23) and its lack of representation of people of colour (Br20), contributing to ‘oppressive’ continuation of the ‘status quo’ (Lv45) rather than engaging with challenging and underrepresented narratives. This rejection of West End theatre and Hollywood films therefore came from a desire to engage with challenging and thought-­provoking art (see Section 7.1), which participants recognised was not for everyone and not always what they themselves were seeking from an arts experience. Particularly in relation to film, participants were aware of times in which they sought a film in which ‘not a lot happens but there’s a lot of stuff happening’ (Br19) and other times in which they liked the escapism and immersion of a film: ‘the more tired I’ve got (laughing) the older I’ve got, I’m a bit like “Don’t challenge me too much” if I’m going to watch a film. If I see theatre, I really want to be challenged’ (Br21). Rife throughout these comments are ideas of legitimate arts engagement and illegitimate entertainment (Levine, 1990); participants were at pains to show that they were ‘not a cultural snob’ (Lv32) in rejecting mainstream art forms, describing their tastes as ‘highbrow and low’ (Ld19) and describing how it was only certain subgenres which they disliked (such as Marvel films (Lv27) and jukebox musicals (Ld27)) rather than writing off the whole scene. One Liverpool participant was particularly concerned about how people perceived his ‘pretentious’ taste in European films: It probably links back [to] the sort of the fiction which I’m really into and all of that. I always felt like self-­consciously pretentious or, like, the things which I read would be interpreted in that way. And I think particularly, you know, this idea of the ‘lit bro’, who’s really into their . . . and, like, a lot of my tastes are exactly that. (Lv12) (for a discussion of the ‘lit bro’ parody, see Baillie, 2015) In contrast with this ‘lit bro’ perspective, other participants wanted to make clear that their rejection of musical theatre and blockbuster films was based on

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personal preference and ethical considerations rather than on a desire to appear cultured. The spaces in which the arts happen, the funding mechanisms in which they operate, the audience who are there, the way those people are behaving and the type of art being presented therefore combined to drive attendance for UACA participants. This could be a distinct characteristic of those audience members who engage with the contemporary arts, in that since the work is untried and untested, other aspects of the experience take on greater importance in the decision-­making process. In addition, the desire to dwell in these sites of curation points to the social value of arts attendance. One the one hand, this could be a sense of tribalism and a desire to spend time with like-­minded people, at the risk of excluding others. On the other hand, again there is a sense of ethical consumption and social engagement in the drive to spend time in smaller and more alternative venues or to see work that speaks to the social issues of the day. Also in the mix is good old-­fashioned loyalty and routine (de Rooij, 2013), in that participants were comfortable in these spaces and trusted the work they presented. 5.1.3  Culture Feast

We started this project by asking whether there was crossover between contemporary arts, or whether there could be considered to be a discrete contemporary arts audience. By asking audiences to discuss their engagement with a range of artistic disciplines, we have found no easy answers to this question. While there were a small number of participants who did engage with the contemporary side of all art forms, many have radically different forms of engagement across multiple art forms, leading us to realise that within every attender is a nonattender. As examples in this chapter have shown, audiences can be dedicated attenders of contemporary events in one art form but still feel alienated by another art form, attending only the most familiar, classic works. In response to this finding, arts organisations in Birmingham used the action research phase of this project to test out a new initiative for supporting contemporary arts attenders to discover new works in other art forms. The Birmingham Contemporary Arts Network (BCAN) developed Culture Feast,4 a multi-­buy ticket in which attenders purchase one ticket and gain access to five to seven contemporary arts events across multiple art forms, selected and curated by the BCAN steering group. Culture Feast ran for five iterations, and evaluation of the ‘Feasters’ experience suggested that it successfully mitigated the difficulties of choice that attenders face when taking a foray into a new art form. In evaluation surveys, interviews and conversations with the researchers at Culture Feast events,5 Feasters described how much they liked having a series of arts events chosen for them in advance, and the simplicity of one ticket granting access to multiple events: I thought it was a great idea to kind of plan ahead with all the culture. . . . It’s very convenient for me to have – you know, I just put them all in my

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diary, you know. It’s like, I have a cultural diary! . . . I didn’t have to really look that much for what was going on. It’s all there; you have a programme of so many events in the range of so many months. (CF2) The idea of having ‘a set number of evenings that were related to the arts’ (CF1) was appealing to several ticket-­holders, some of whom saw Culture Feast as a cheaper way to engage with the kinds of arts they were already attending, while others saw it as a way to engage more frequently: ‘let’s do a fair bit for a short period of time’ (CF1). Nevertheless, the convenience of having events preselected had a downside, in that Culture Feast had no flexibility of dates: no single Feaster managed to attend every event in their package, with prior commitments, difficulty getting to the event after work and even an unseasonal snowstorm preventing ticket-­holders from attending. Collaborating arts organisations were understandably worried by these absences and money lost by unused tickets that could have been sold at full price. BCAN sought to minimise these risks by asking organisations to include events which had plenty of spare capacity and would be unlikely to sell out; however, the absence of audience members was still a disappointment for the Culture Feast group. The original conception of Culture Feast was that it would act like a book club for arts events, building on the successful Audience Exchanges from the UACA pilot study; each cohort of ticket-­holders was therefore intended to meet and form a discussion group before and after each event. In practice, this was not well understood at the point of purchase but was of interest to ticket-­ holders as the events progressed: ‘I wasn’t completely clear on the purpose of the ticket when I bought it (i.e. the book club element) . . . but I think this would have been of real interest to me if I had understood it better!’ (Emailed feedback). Despite many attempts to create an environment for open discussion, this was never really successful; many of the performances did not have an interval and were preceded by an artist Q&A, which left little opportunity for conversation around the event. Participants were (understandably) reticent to arrive early or stay later: ‘I thought that [meeting other Feasters] would be interesting, yes. But, erm, it depends . . . on you know, time and what kind of mood you’re in, because sometimes you just wanna see the show and go home’ (CF2). This led to conflicting expectations, where some Feasters were hoping to meet new people through Culture Feast, while others were demonstrably not interested in discussion, meaning the ‘book club’ idea lacked the momentum to take hold. Ultimately, the fluctuating take-­up of the five Culture Feast ‘menus’ led BCAN to question its sustainability, since the large amount of work needed to curate each ticket was a high risk for potentially little impact. That being said, feedback from ticket-­holders certainly showed that Culture Feast introduced people to new venues, organisations and art forms that they would not normally have attended: ‘I thought it was a great way of trying new events’ (CFES) and ‘It’s a way of seeing stuff I wouldn’t normally come across’ (CFES). Culture

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Feast was successful in bypassing the challenges of engaging with a new art form by fostering an ethos of open-­mindedness: You feel like you can come into something and not know very much at all about whatever art form it is, and that’s okay and that people will talk to you and then open it up a little bit for you. (CF1) This Feaster hesitantly described her attitude to contemporary music, showing how Culture Feast had made her think differently and challenged her expectations: [At the BCMG Debussy concert] I . . . expected to be bored. . . . If that had been a free concert, I probably wouldn’t have gone . . . but I thought I’d go, given that I’d signed up to Culture Feast and it was one of the things. It sounds a bit strange, actually, but um . . . yeah, almost a commitment to try out all the different art forms that Culture Feast had. . . . Yeah. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all! . . . I think, literally, if a friend of mine was playing there and she said, ‘I’ve got you a ticket’, I  probably wouldn’t go [but] if I bought another Culture Feast ticket, I probably would. Just so strange. (CF1) The decision to buy a Culture Feast ticket therefore carried a pledge to be open minded and to try out new art forms as well as a commitment to attend a series of arts events over a small number of weeks; this is undoubtedly exclusive for certain segments of the audience, since while the price was kept as low as possible, those, for example, with caring responsibilities or on unpredictable working hours may not have been able to plan that far ahead (see Price et al., 2019 and Chapter 9, Section 1). Nevertheless, even for those unable to attend, the multi-­art form ticket acted as a showcase for contemporary arts in the city, formalising the kinds of gateways and signposts that introduce audiences to new organisations and fostering confidence in the cultural offering of the city: ‘It just, it made me feel lucky to live here and have access to . . . so many creative people who were doing such incredible things. . . . So I felt quite privileged, really’ (CF1). Culture Feast therefore demonstrated a potential model for encouraging culturally aware nonattenders (cf. Winzenried, 2004) to cross the threshold into a new venue. Since participants were shown to be just as influenced by context as genre, Culture Feast could be seen as a new site of curation, building on participants’ trust of familiar organisations and venues, and a low ticket price, to secure their attendance at other contemporary arts events in the city. By removing the effort and indecision of having to select events in an unfamiliar art form, the multi-­buy ticket balanced the potential risk of a bad experience with the convenience of having cultural activities decided for you, in a social

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space in which it was okay not to like or know anything about a particular event (see Chapters 7 and 8 for further discussion).

5.2  Spaces for the arts Building loyalty to a venue or organisation has historically been believed to increase risk-­taking and frequency of attendance (Newman, 1981; Rentschler, Radbourne, Carr, & Rickard, 2002); we would add to this that a venue being local and therefore convenient to attend also increases attendance there: ‘we’re about to have a new cinema building . . . literally across from our road, [so] I’m sure we’ll be going more in the future’ (Ld14). Our previous studies in classical music have shown audiences developing relationships with the venue and its staff and therefore feeling a sense of obligation in their attendance, since their individual absence would be noticed, and collectively, low attendance might even jeopardise the future of the organisation (Pitts  & Spencer, 2008). Our analysis here, however, demonstrates another, more consumer-­like behaviour, in that repeat attendance at the same venue gave participants a better understanding of the type of work that venue presented, therefore enabling them to make a more informed decision about whether or not to attend: ‘[Tate exhibitions] all tend to be the same. . . . There’s 14 rooms, from the first to the last, and I can tell you exactly how they’re going to be structuring the next exhibition’ (Ld09). The relationship between venue and organisation is interesting in the case of Mayfest in Bristol, about whom two participants expressed a wish that they had their own theatre, since they trust them as a producing company and a venue would therefore make their theatregoing decisions much easier: The only problem I find with Mayfest is that it is all packed in so suddenly, if it was like a venue that did those sorts of things throughout the year then you could kind of keep checking their listings and spread them out, and you are more likely to do stuff. (Br21) Size was an important determining characteristic of many discussions of venues across the performing arts. For music performances, participants often spoke about their preference for smaller venues, which provided a more ‘intimate’ experience, bringing them to be closer to the artist and intensifying their emotional response because they were able to see the artists’ expressions more clearly: ‘when it comes to a solo performance  .  .  . there’s a lot of facial expression. . . . Anything more than like 20 metres . . . that is completely lost’ (Ld26). Since smaller venues by necessity have smaller audiences, participants felt that they were getting a more special experience than if they were amongst a crowd of thousands: ‘a smaller venue where you can have a bit of space and have a bit more of a unique experience’ (Br43). The closeness and small audience led them to feel more ‘engaged’ with the

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performance, feeling more focused and attentive than in a big arena: ‘[at a smaller venue] you feel more part of it. You just feel like you’re almost part of the production’ (Ld18). Small venues were also described in ethical terms (see Section 5.3), as a place to give ticket revenue to more deserving causes than large funded or commercial enterprises: ‘[attending DIY venues] doesn’t feel like it’s playing into the hands of the neo-­liberal marketplace’ (Lv45). Attendance at small venues therefore had a somewhat political and anti-­commercial dimension, especially given participants’ awareness of the threat posed by gentrification to small arts venues and studios (Wasielewski, 2018; Behr, Webster, Brennan, Cloonan, & Ansell, 2019; Behr, Brennan, & Cloonan, 2014). This ethical language continued into descriptions of other audience members, who were problematically felt to be there for the ‘right reasons’ in a smaller venue. I find bigger venues a bit stressful . . . [whereas smaller and community venues] a lot of people go there with a much friendlier attitude. So I’ve even sort of on occasion been to these things on my own and you can just strike up conversations with other people who are also there on their own, you know, ’cos they’re really there for the music. (Ld33) In addition, artists at smaller venues were seen as more down to earth, with a sense of levelling the hierarchy between artist and audience: ‘it doesn’t have that whole “I’m the star playing in an arena with like great lighting”. It’s just like, “I’m here to entertain you and it feels good when I see that you appreciate it” ’ (Ld33). Some participants loved that there was a chance of bumping into the artist in the bar afterwards, and being able to congratulate them on their performance: ‘if you had stayed for a drink after, some of [the actors] would come and join us and have a chat with you and [say] “Did you enjoy it?” and what they were doing next’ (Lv29). Audiences at small venues were described as being friendlier than at large venues, and it was easier to strike up a conversation with a stranger, which meant that participants were more comfortable attending alone: I quite like smaller venues. . . . You speak to more people in a small venue. There have been times when like I have gone with my friends, we have gone into the bar and we have lost each other but then it’s fine because you can just speak to other people around you because you have all got the same interest. (Lv41) Smaller spaces were therefore easier to navigate socially, and indeed, some explicitly discussed feeling anxious in large crowds: ‘I generally like smaller [gigs]. . . . I have, not that bad, but somewhat anxiety, so venues where I feel comfortable in moving around tend to be ones I  prefer’(Br16). However,

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large venues afforded a sense of anonymity, the ability to get lost in the crowd: I was the only person in there [visiting a museum abroad].  .  .  . I kind of found that weird because then it’s as if the people that work there are watching you, whether you enjoy it and you feel like you have to spend longer . . . whereas when there’s quite a few people, I guess you don’t feel as self-­conscious. (Br08) While small venues were on the whole preferred, being in a tiny venue or a very scant audience could be really intimidating and leave audiences feeling like their reactions were being watched by the artist and other audience members. One participant described how the introduction of a reception desk had changed her experience of her local art gallery, reducing the anonymity she had previously found helpful: One thing that has changed about the museum, . . . it’s still free but now you’ve got to walk past the reception desk and they ask you for a donation. . . . That has changed my experience of going there, whereas like compared to when you could like literally just walk in and nobody spoke to you . . . on a not-­so-­good day, I would find it harder to [walk in]. (Br10) Others noted that in theatre the front-­row seats were often the last to be sold because many people were uncomfortable being that close to the performance: ‘people are like, “Oh no, no, I wanna sit at the back, I wanna sit at the back” . . . and I’m like, “No, put me in the front row” ’ (Br31) and ‘people never fill the front row where I always, I always mainline for the front row’ (Ld16). Large venues were also preferred when they were appropriate for the type of event being shown, such as spectacular musical theatre productions, large-­scale ballets or orchestral concerts, where the production demands a large stage: It depends on what the show is. If it’s a musical, I definitely would prefer a big theatre otherwise you just lose it . . . because you need to have an overview of a musical as opposed to concentrating on each individual’s moves. (Ld26) 5.2.1  Shaping the arts experience

The influence of venues on the decision to attend is therefore best understood as the interaction of space and artwork, in which the venue can enhance, disrupt or simply be conducive to the work on offer. Site-­specific works and performances in unusual venues were prime examples of when the venue could enhance the offering. Participants in Liverpool spoke fondly of previous

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Liverpool Biennial festivals in which art was displayed in buildings usually closed to the public and felt something was missing from the 2018 festival, which primarily took place in established arts venues: What they do with the Biennial, they haven’t done so much this year which is a big disappointment, is they have not done a lot of the public spaces stuff, and also gone into different unusual places . . . Cain’s Brewery . . . the old post office . . . Rapid, the old DIY store. (Lv33) The opportunity to see behind closed doors added an extra incentive to attend, particularly for those interested in architecture or local heritage, and a number of participants across the cities liked the juxtaposition of historical buildings featuring contemporary art. In London, the Royal Academy was appreciated as ‘such a fabulous building and then you see something really unexpected inside it’ (Ld12) although one participant in Liverpool did not like this same contrast at the Bluecoat: I don’t like this space, because the building’s lovely from the outside [but] as soon as you come in, you get hit with [what is] for all intents and purposes . . . a modern building. . . . It could be a modern art gallery in Spain or somewhere. (Lv06) A participant in Bristol was particularly interested in arts events that happen in venues that take a risk with the combination of work and space: ‘I think sometimes these outdoor performances really appeal as well if people try to do something that seemingly isn’t going to work, that’s quite nice’ (Br14). Also for particularly famous venues, some participants wanted to visit it as a kind of bucket-­list item; therefore, their decision to attend was primarily driven by venue with the artwork taking a lesser role: ‘went and saw Salome at the Royal Opera House just because it was one of those, I suppose, bucket list items. . . . I thought, I just want to experience the Royal Opera House and a production there’ (Ld18). At other times, venues could disrupt the participants’ experience of arts events. While some disrupting factors were generic intrusions on audiences’ comfort, such as being too hot or cold, not having comfortable seats, or having inadequate facilities (such as bad toilets, disappointing food or the fact that you snag your clothes on the furniture (Lv20)), many disruptive factors were art form specific. In theatre and dance, venues were disruptive if they had poor sightlines, as participants were frustrated to not be able to see parts of the stage, especially from the ‘cheap seats’: I’ve gone to see bands at Royal Festival Hall. I’ve also seen performances of plays at the National Theatre. . . . They’re great venues, acoustics are really

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great, but if you’ve got really, pardon my French, shit seats, then you’re kind of a bit buggered. (Ld29) In galleries, venues disrupted their experience if they were too crowded and they were not able to walk around at their own pace or take their time looking at the artworks; blockbuster exhibitions were particularly guilty of this: Blockbusters [exhibitions] are so busy, now, you know. You have to book a time slot and you get there and you are literally shuffling along. . . . Unless you can get a really out-­of-­hours ticket and go at a really inconvenient time. Some of them are pretty unpleasant to be in, really. (Ld28) In music, venues with poor acoustics were disruptive and negated the benefits of live performance, since ‘I might as well just buy the CD and stay at home and listen to it properly (laughing)’ (Br23). Whether the audience was seated or standing could leave participants feeling tired for performances where they would like to sit and trapped for gigs where they would like to dance: [At a recent electronic music event] I didn’t appreciate the fact there was nowhere to sit. So I actually ended up lying on the floor because I wanted to sort of be comfortable and I wanted to just close my eyes and sort of let happen what might happen listening to the sound. But I think . . . some people wanted to stand up. Some people danced. Some people sat on the floor, and probably I was only one of two people who lay down, but I felt it wasn’t . . . catering for different people’s sort of needs. (Br07) For many arts events, the ideal scenario was for participants to not even notice the venue as they focused on the artwork itself: ‘if what you’re watching is gripping, really you could be just sitting in a bar and it doesn’t matter, does it?’ (Ld39). I think the only thing that affects your experience is if a venue purely isn’t conducive to music appreciation or performance. . . . There is . . . something that is indescribable almost about why one venue will work and another very similar venue just won’t. (Lv09) These responses echo theories of absorption and flow in arts experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013) as well as the concept of place attachment, whereby familiarity with a venue causes audiences to overlook its shortcomings as it captures less of their attention (Pitts & Spencer, 2008; Manzo & Perkins, 2006; Kyle, Graefe, Manning, & Bacon, 2004). Of course, there are also questions of

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privilege at play, since participants need to feel comfortable enough in a venue to be able to forget where they are: some audience members, feeling like the odd one out in a performance space, may never be able to forget about the building they are in (see Section 9.1). Participants found that some venues were very welcoming spaces, while others felt hostile and uninviting. The physical space, especially the doors and foyer, affected whether people felt physically and emotionally able to enter a venue: after an encounter with a security guard left her ‘confused and a bit embarrassed about being confused’, one participant concluded that ‘the first rule should be it should be obvious how you get in and how the doors open’ (Ld35). Inadequately displayed information about access and opening times was also a reported problem: ‘we find all the time in places in the Baltic Triangle is you don’t know when they’re gonna be open. . . . We joke they’re just a bit too cool to tell you what’s happening’ (Lv44). Other participants noted the attitude of the staff, saying, ‘It’s always important how you’re greeted, how you’re welcomed into a space’ (Ld04), and objected to the rules imposed in some spaces that ‘won’t let you in there with backpacks . . . just stop putting barriers in for stuff like that’ (Br42). 5.2.2  Liminal spaces

Throughout this project, we have become increasingly interested in the role of cafes, bars, gardens and shops within arts venues. We refer to these areas as ‘liminal’ spaces, a term we have borrowed from organisational studies to describe the spaces that are ‘betwixt-­and-­between’ (Turner, 1977, p. 33) the outside world and the arts space. While these liminal spaces do at times function as a transition between everyday life and the arts experience within, our partner organisations were fully aware that many people use them as just a cafe or just a garden without ever engaging with the artworks inside: ‘I feel quite bad, but whenever I come over here [to the Bluecoat garden], [the art] always seems like the secondary thing, “Oh yeah, we can do this thing but we can also go see the art” ’ (Lv11). Participants included those who engaged with liminal but not arts spaces, even to the extent of not having realised the cafe belonged to an arts venue, often feeling guilty for doing so: ‘I used to work right around the corner, so I only knew of Spike Island as a cafe? Which is really bad. . . . I didn’t realise there was that bit at the back! (laughing)’ (Br03). Since their potential for audience development is complex, because they may attract new visitors but not necessarily new audiences, liminal spaces raise the question of the role of arts venues in contemporary cities. On the one hand, liminal spaces provide hospitality for audience members. They create a sense of welcome and invite visitors over the threshold; while it may not be clear whether a gallery is open to the public or free to enter, potential visitors know how to behave in a cafe and that they are entitled to spend time in there, providing they buy some refreshments: If I go to something [in a small DIY gallery] which I might be interested in, but I still feel like, I don’t know, is this the way in? Is it open to the

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public? Am I required to have a conversation with the artist about something which I don’t understand? . . . Even though I’m quite confident in what I’m interested in, . . . I still feel intimidated and don’t like crossing that threshold. (Lv12) This can also help participants to feel looked after. Liminal spaces also have the potential to extend an arts visit and ‘make a day of it’, by combining a gallery visit with lunch or a theatre performance with dinner: We like the whole experience of The Royal Court. . . . Their theatre bar is lovely. . . . You have a drink [and a meal], it’s quite nice. . . . There might be some nice shops round there, we make a little bit of a thing, ’cos it’s . . . different to where we live. So yeah, that’s the whole package. (Ld07) This can be an opportunity to enhance engagement, as one participant spoke of reading up about the art she had seen in the cafe afterwards: ‘It always helps when there’s a good cafe (laughing). . . . It’s another way of enjoying the space and relaxing and maybe sitting there and reading the information that you’ve got afterwards or something’ (Ld35). In this way, liminal spaces have the potential to blur the lines between arts experiences and everyday life. For those who engage with the arts, liminal spaces are about bringing the everyday into their arts experiences, providing a place to eat, meet friends, relax, do some work in addition to attending an arts event. For others, liminal spaces bring the potential of arts experiences into these everyday activities, an idea that Liverpool organisations are exploring through the action research phase (see Section 10.3.1). For those who are engaging with liminal spaces as a consumer and not an arts attender, the fact that the cafe or bar is situated within an arts organisation appears to affect their experience. As with the discussion of smaller venues earlier, participants felt that patronising the liminal spaces of arts institutions had a philanthropic element, in that they were supporting local and independent businesses rather than ‘chucking money into some weird machine’ (Lv11). The cafes in arts venues were seen as nicer and more wholesome places to be, where the staff were not trying to hurry you out of the door: ‘it’s a really lovely space. It’s very easy, you know, nobody’s going to throw us out of here for lingering too long’ (Br19). Therefore these liminal spaces are used as part of a lifestyle; they are seen as anti-­consumerist, especially gardens in which there is no obligation to spend any money by being there. Arts venues may therefore be plugging a gap created by the closure of public spaces such as community centres, youth clubs or libraries, providing a refuge for visitors in which they are not only valued by the money in their pocket (see Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2017). The

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aesthetic and anti-­commercial atmosphere of liminal spaces therefore represented to some participants ‘a kind of world that it emotes that you’d like your world to be more like’ (Ld38). Venue is commonly understood as an important factor in arts attendance decision-­making (Martinez, Euzéby,  & Lallement, 2018), but participants pointed out that often they did not have a choice, since if they were eager to see a particular production or artist, they would have to go to whichever venue was hosting the event: ‘I don’t really think that much about the venues, I’m definitely like content first rather than venue’ (Ld32), ‘It’s very hard to see [classical music] if it’s not in a sort of standard classical venue’ (Ld24) and ‘Even places that I don’t like, I will go to if there’s a thing that’s on that’s interesting to me’ (Ld11). Many participants had complaints about music arenas, which were depicted as the worst possible venues, with audiences not treated well (uncomfortable seats, bad toilets, long queues, security searches), everything being very expensive and the experience was that of watching artists on giant screens because they were so far away: I would never go and see a popular artist play at a concert ever . . . unless you are going to see one of those big artists and you are right close to them, close to the stage, then there is no point going to see them in my opinion because you are seeing a screen. (Ld43) Participants would put up with all these issues, however, if it was the only way to see an artist they loved. Cinema was the only real opportunity that participants had to decide which venue they would like to attend, and decisions were based on a mixture of price, location and convenience, whether it had comfortable seats, the size of the screen and whether you could take drinks (implicitly, alcoholic or hot) into the screening.

5.3  Conclusions: ethical choices in the arts ecology Comparing how participants talked about various art forms draws attention to the limits of translating knowledge, experience and ability to engage with one art form to another. Narrative works with a clear storyline or message seemed to make it easier for participants to connect with in art forms about which they were less confident, and furthermore, stories with strong social or political themes could attract participants with relevant interests to a venue or art form for the first time. Similarly, venues that were openly welcoming, inclusive and connected to their local area were particularly embraced by participants, who were conscious of supporting independent organisations, grassroots collectives and emerging artists. By examining arts engagement across multiple art forms and venues, we have found a new form of engagement amongst contemporary arts attenders: ethical

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consumption. The notion of the ethical or responsible consumer (Giesler & Veresiu, 2014; Zolfagharian & Pentina, 2011) has grown with force in the UK in recent years with growing awareness and concern for the social and environmental impact of consumption (Weber Shandwick & KRC Research, 2018; Plante, 2019; Ulusoy, 2016). Ethical purchasing is a type of consumer activism (Paeth, 2018) built on the principle that customer demand drives market trends, and therefore, boycotting or ‘buycotting’ (avoiding or actively buying certain products, respectively) can force companies to conduct business in a more ethical way. While some high-­profile initiatives have been a force for large-­scale change (such as the reduction in single-­use plastic following the premier of Blue Planet II dubbed the ‘Attenborough Effect’ (McCarthy & Sanchez, 2019)), critics point to a gap between the intention to consume ethically and the difficulty of changing patterns of buying behaviour (Carrington, Zwick, & Neville, 2016). Furthermore, campaigns for individuals to reduce their carbon emissions, for example, suggest that environmental issues are the responsibility of the general public (Valor, Antonetti, & Carrero, 2018) rather than holding large companies to account. In the arts, while friends and membership schemes have encouraged charitable giving to arts organisations (Pitts, Herrero, & Price, 2020), and attendance itself is at times viewed as a form of philanthropic support by audience members (Pitts, 2014), the ethical choices described by our participants had another distinctive dimension. As demonstrated earlier, participants made choices about which arts organisations to patronise based on their social values, supporting specific events based on their social themes or their showcasing of underrepresented artists (see Section 7.1.1): I try to be very kind of conscious about how I  spend my money now.  .  .  . I want to be supporting artists and giving artists from like diverse communities or LGBT communities the opportunity to also have a career. (Ld32) This added another layer to the already complex attendance factors of aesthetic preference, art form interests, convenience and price and raised the act of arts engagement to one of cultural activism.

Notes 1 www.gov.uk/guidance/taking-­part-­survey 2 Stan’s Cafe’s It’s Your Film. 3 A late-­night radio programme on BBC Radio 3, which prides itself on playing eclectic music, with the current tagline: ‘Experimental music for adventurous listeners’. 4 www.culturefeast.org/ 5 Anonymous evaluation surveys (coded CFES) were conducted after each Culture Feast and four ‘feasters’ (coded CF1–4) were interviewed about their experiences. In addition, Sarah attended almost all the Culture Feast events for the first two iterations and spoke to the ticket-­holders at length about their experiences.

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References Arts Council England. (2014). This England: How arts council England uses its investment to shape a national cultural ecology. Retrieved from www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/ files/download-­file/This_England_report.pdf Baillie, G. (2015, September 22). Bro, do you even lit? [Blog post] The Strand. Retrieved from https://thestrand.ca/bro-­do-­you-­even-­lit/ Behr, A., Brennan, M., & Cloonan, M. (2014). The cultural value of live music from the pub to the stadium: Getting beyond the numbers. Live Music Exchange. Retrieved from http:// livemusicexchange.org/wp-­content/uploads/The-­Cultural-­Value-­of-­Live-­Music-­Pub-­ to-­Stadium-­report.pdf Behr, A., Brennan, M., Cloonan, M., Frith, S., & Webster, E. (2016). Live concert performance: An ecological approach. Rock Music Studies, 3, 5–23. doi:10.1080/19401159.20 15.1125633 Behr, A., Webster, E., Brennan, M., Cloonan, M., & Ansell, J. (2019). Making live music count: The UK Live Music Census. Popular music and Society, 1–23. doi:10.1080/03007 766.2019.1627658 Brown, A. S., & Novak-­Leonard, J. L. (2013). Measuring the intrinsic impacts of arts attendance. Cultural Trends, 22, 223–233. doi:10.1080/09548963.2013.817654 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. (2017). Rethinking relationships: Inquiry into the civic role of arts organisations: Phase 1 report. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Retrieved from http://civicroleartsinquiry.gulbenkian.org.uk/resources/rethinking-­relationships-­ phase-­one-­of-­the-­inquiry-­into-­the-­civic-­role-­of-­arts-­organisations Carnwath, J. D., & Brown, A. S. (2014). Understanding the value and impacts of cultural experiences: A  literature review. Manchester: Arts Council England. Retrieved from www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-­file/Understanding_the_Value_and_ Impacts_of_Cultural_Experiences.pdf Carrington, M. J., Zwick, D., & Neville, B. (2016). The ideology of the ethical consumption gap. Marketing Theory, 16, 21–38. doi:10.1177/1470593115595674 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness. London, Sydney, Auckland, and Johannesburg: Rider. de Rooij, P. (2013). Customer loyalty to performing arts venues. Between routines and coincidence. (Doctoral Dissertation) Retrieved from https://pure.uvt.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/1499760/ Rooij_Customer_13-­03-­2013.pdf Doeser, J. (2014). This England: How arts council England uses its investment to shape a national cultural ecology. Cultural Trends, 23, 298–303. doi:10.1080/09548963.2014. 961299 Giesler, M.,  & Veresiu, E. (2014). Creating the responsible consumer: Moralistic governance regimes and consumer subjectivity. Journal of Consumer Research, 41, 840–857. doi:10.1086/677842 Gross, J., & Wilson, N. (2018). Cultural democracy: An ecological and capabilities approach. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 1–16. doi:10.1080/10286632.2018.1538363 Jenkins, C., & Joven, J. (2018, March 13). Spotify: The rise of the contextual playlist [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.chartmetric.io/spotify-­the-­r ise-­of-­the-­contextual-­playlist­c6f2c26900f4 Kyle, G., Graefe, A., Manning, R., & Bacon, J. (2004). Effects of place attachment on users’ perceptions of social and environmental conditions in a natural setting. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(2), 213–225. Levine, L. W. (1990). Highbrow lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Boston: Harvard University Press.

100  Art forms, venues and decision-­making Manzo, L. C., & Perkins, D. D. (2006). Finding common ground: The importance of place attachment to community participation and planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 20, 335–350. doi:10.1177/0885412205286160 Martinez, C., Florence, E.,  & Lallement, J. (2018). The importance of the venue in an information search: Online ticket purchase in the performing arts. International Journal of Arts Management, 20(3), 60–74. McCarthy, J., & Sanchez, E. (2019, April 17). The ‘Attenborough effect’ is causing plastic pollution to plummet [Blog post]. Global Citizen. Retrieved from www.globalcitizen.org/ en/content/attenborough-­effect-­plastics/ Newman, D. (1981). Subscribe now! Building arts audiences through dynamic subscription promotion. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Paeth, S. (2018). Consumer activism. In R. Kolb (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of business ethics and society (Vol. 1., pp.  628–632). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. doi:10.4135/9781483381503.n232 Peterson, R. A., & Kern, R. M. (1996). Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review, 61, 90–907. doi:10.2307/2096460 Pitts, S. E. (2014). Musical, social and moral dilemmas: Investigating audience motivations to attend concerts. In K. Burland & S. E. Pitts (Eds.), Coughing and clapping: Investigating audience experience (pp. 21–33). Farnham: Ashgate. Pitts, S. E. (2016). On the edge of their seats: Comparing first impressions and regular attendance in arts audiences. Psychology of Music, 44, 1175–1192. doi:10.1177/0305735615615420 Pitts, S. E., & Gross, J. (2017). ‘Audience exchange’: Cultivating peer-­to-­peer dialogue at unfamiliar arts events. Arts and the Market, 7, 65–79. doi:10.1108/AAM-­04-­2016-­0002 Pitts, S. E., Herrero, M.,  & Price, S. M. (2020). Understanding the liminality of individual giving to the arts. Arts and the Market, 10(1), 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1108/ AAM-­08-­2019-­0026 Pitts, S. E., & Spencer, C. P. (2008). Loyalty and longevity in audience listening: Investigating experiences of attendance at a chamber music festival. Music and Letters, 89, 227–238. doi:10.1093/ml/gcm084 Plante, S. G. (2019, October 7). Shopping has become a political act. Here’s how it happened [Blog post]. Vox. Retrieved from www.vox.com/the-­goods/2019/10/7/20894134/ consumer-­activism-­conscious-­consumerism-­explained Price, S. M. (2017). Risk and reward in classical music concert attendance: Investigating the engagement of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ audiences with a regional symphony orchestra in the UK (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16628/ Price, S. M., Perry, R., Mantell, O., Trinder, J., & Pitts, S. (2019). Spontaneity and planning in arts attendance: Insights from qualitative interviews and the audience finder database. Cultural Trends, 28(2–3), 220–238. doi:10.1080/09548963.2019.1617943 Radbourne, J., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (Eds.). (2013). The audience experience: A critical analysis of audiences in the performing arts. Bristol: Intellect. Rentschler, R., Radbourne, J., Carr, R.,  & Rickard, J. (2002). Relationship marketing, audience retention and performing arts organisation viability. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Market, 7, 118–130. doi:10.1002/nvsm.173 Sedgman, K. (2017b, August 4). Understanding theatre fans [Blog post]. Retrieved from www. thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/understanding-­theatre-­fans Stark, P., Gordon, C., & Powell, D. (2013). Rebalancing our cultural capital. Retrieved from www.gpsculture.co.uk/downloads/rocc/Rebalancing_FINAL_3mb.pdf Turner, V. W. (1977). The ritual process: Structure and anti-­structure. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Art forms, venues and decision-­making 101 Ulusoy, E. (2016). Experiential responsible consumption. Journal of Business Research, 69(1), 284–297. Valor, C., Antonetti, P., & Carrero, I. (2018). Stressful sustainability: A hermeneutic analysis. European Journal of Marketing, 52, 550–574. doi:10.1108/EJM-­12-­2016-­0712 Wasielewski, A. (2018). Made in Brooklyn: Artists, hipsters, makers, and gentrification. Alresford: Zero Books. Watson, C. (2015, May 22). ‘Context is the new genre’: Why it’s all about the why [Blog post]. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/soundwave-­stories/context-­is­the-­new-­genre-­b5df54ca0b5 Weber Shandwick  & KRC Research. (2018). Battle of the wallets: The changing landscape of consumer activism. Retrieved from http://webershandwick.co.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2018/01/Battle-­of-­the-­wallets-­report-­UK.pdf Winzenried, R. (2004, January–February). Stalking the culturally aware non-­attender. Symphony, 26–32. Zolfagharian, M. A., & Pentina, I. (2011). The tripartite model of responsible consumption. Social Business: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1, 149–172. doi:10.1362/204440811X593054

6 Routes to engagement in the contemporary arts

Lifelong engagement in the arts is conventionally understood as something that has its roots in childhood, typically in supportive families, where the parents identify and encourage early signs of creative interests and skills and in educational opportunities, whether in school or through privately funded tuition (Pitts, 2012; McPherson, Davidson,  & Faulkner, 2012). This trajectory of learning within a supportive environment exists for a fortunate minority of people but relies heavily on a home context with sufficient resources to prioritise and fund arts opportunities: sending children to ballet or piano lessons, for example, is a decision that a family makes based on both financial means and a belief that activities of this kind are valuable for their children’s development. Anna Bull’s (2019) detailed study of young people engaged in classical music learning proposes that ‘the intensively shaped, individualized middle-­class self-­ described in sociological studies of classed parenting can be mapped onto the form of musical selfhood that is shaped through classical music pedagogy’ (Bull, 2019, p.  6): in other words, arts opportunities in childhood are intertwined with class and cultural values in ways that are often unacknowledged by or invisible to the participants. In addition to these sociological boundaries to arts opportunities, development psychology in the arts talks of ‘windows of opportunity’ for learning, though recent studies of brain plasticity in musical instrument training focus more on the benefits for nonmusical outcomes (e.g. fine motor skills and auditory discrimination; Schlaug, Norton, Overy, & Winner, 2005) than on finding the optimum moment for music tuition (see Miendlarzewska  & Trost, 2014, for a useful summary). Embedded deeper in mythologies of music learning is the idea that playing a musical instrument is dependent on an early start and innate ‘talent’, so narrowing definitions of ‘musicality’ (Hallam, 2015, p. 72) and causing many adults to consider that they have left it ‘too late’ to be involved in music-­making (but see Holt, 1978; Booth, 1999 for strong counterexamples). For young dancers, the impetus towards early development and intense training is fully embodied (Pickard, 2012), with cultural norms of the ‘ideal ballet body’ shaping young dancers’ physical and mental health in sometimes damaging ways (Pickard, 2013). Opportunities to dance in childhood are

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mediated by family culture, particularly in relation to masculinity, reflecting ‘a parent’s view that it is acceptable, admirable or even necessary for a boy to move well (or on the contrary that it is unacceptable, shameful, or even unnecessary for him to dance)’ (Craig, 2014, p. 139). Like drama, and increasingly music (Daubney, Spruce,  & Annetts, 2019), provision of dance education is often minimal in British schools, marginalised within the physical education curriculum (Arts Council England, n.d.a) despite evidence of its benefits for young people’s development and wellbeing (What Works Wellbeing, 2017). Only visual art, long established as a staple of primary school education and an option in secondary schools (Downing & Watson, 2004), is a guaranteed part of most children’s formative arts experiences. Beyond this, opportunities provided in the home are therefore becoming the main route to arts engagement for many young people, so increasing inequality of provision and perpetuating class divides in the arts (Bull, 2019). Parallels can be drawn between early opportunities for arts engagement and the accumulation of advantages observed in sports psychology (Gladwell, 2008), where physical aptitude and early success lead to selection for additional training, and so the idea of ‘natural’ sporting prowess is reinforced in the life stories of successful athletes and Olympic winners. From actors, comedians, pop musicians and arts professionals of all kinds come frequent stories in the popular press of early signs of artistic promise being displayed and encouraged: the comedian as class clown, for example, is a trope so strong that it is referenced even when being denied (and has become its own topic for education research; Ruch, Platt, & Hofmann, 2014). Far less often heard are the stories of the hard work that goes into acquiring highly specialised artistic skills, though the need for 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is a well-­rehearsed description of a route to expertise in musical performance (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-­Römer, 1993), as well as other unrelated domains including chess, athletics and medical surgery (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014). Amy Chua’s (2011) self-­deprecating story of her ‘tiger mother’ approach to ensuring that her daughters undertook the necessary practice to achieve her ambitions includes the admission of finding teeth marks on the piano (a somewhat extreme approach to the involvement of parents in musical training; see Davidson, Sloboda, & Howe, 1996). ‘Theatre moms’ feature in several blogs as both an asset and an obstacle for theatre companies working with child actors, including the ‘second-­chance mom’ who ‘gave up or never pursued a career in theatre and is now living through her child’ (Cunningham, 2018). In these examples, arts opportunities in childhood have lasting and unintended consequences for future attitudes and parenting (see Section  6.2.2) while the long-­term effects of curriculum decline in the arts are harder to monitor but undoubtedly significant (Belfiore & Bennett, 2007). There are of course many routes to arts engagement that do not depend on specialist tuition from an early age or intensive childhood opportunities supported by parents. These were well represented amongst our participants, who reported stories of discovering the arts later in life or taking unexpected

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tangents from the path set out by their home and school experiences. Contemporary art seemed to challenge the conventional routes to artistic achievement, blurring the predictable stories of how to become involved in the arts in ways that prioritised self-­generated creativity over teacher-­directed learning. While formative exposure to the arts was often still present in the routes to engagement documented in our national survey (see Section  6.1.1) and our interviews (see Section 6.1.2), these had often been superseded by more recent arts encounters that showed the multiplicity of ‘possible selves’ revealed by powerful arts experiences (Flynn & Johnston, 2016).

6.1  Routes into contemporary arts engagement 6.1.1  Formative arts experiences

Our national survey included a free text question that asked, ‘Can you briefly tell us the story of how you became interested in the art form you are most likely to attend?’ (see Appendix C). The language of inevitability of arts involvement featured strongly in these narratives, particularly in relation to music, theatre and visual art. Respondents who were most likely to attend a classical music concert (n = 10) generally had childhood memories of music learning or concert attendance and a sense of having been involved in music all their lives: ‘I grew up around classical music so just love it’ (NS127). Schools and families had also played a role in fostering long-­lasting enthusiasm for musicals (n  =  17), for respondents who had ‘loved musicals since I  was eight and had the lead in the school show’ (NS054) or who ‘grew up in a town that had an amateur pantomime group for all community members’ (NS098). Strong experiences of seeing live performance were also a feature of these narratives, and the mix of participation and access to ‘the colourful costumes, the stage designs, the story, the dancing, the lights’ (NS137) had shaped the cultural habits of adult theatregoers who preferred classic plays (n = 12): ‘My parents were involved in a local amateur dramatics group, which is actually where they met, so I’ve developed an interest partly through them when growing up’ (NS130). Being ‘always’ interested in their chosen art form was also reported by gallery attenders for both traditional (n = 12) and modern art (n = 15), for whom being taken by ‘parents . . . to galleries when we went on holidays’ (NS126) had been followed by ‘lots of city break-­type holidays in my single pre-­family days’ (NS014). Pop music, even more strongly, was seen as a ‘natural progression from childhood’ (NS047), with over half of these respondents (n = 15) referring to having ‘always’ listened to and attended gigs: ‘Bought tickets with friends, loved it, rinse repeat’ (NS041). These are stories not necessarily of affluence but certainly of easy and sustained access to the arts as part of a lifestyle in which aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation has been fostered from a young age. A different narrative emerged from those national survey respondents who sought out immersive theatre, spoken word and contemporary classical music

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as their preferred arts choices. Here the influences tended to be more recent, sometimes as a replacement for earlier, more traditional preferences, including becoming ‘bored with [the] predictability of much mainstream music’ (NS008). There were a higher number of arts practitioners amongst these respondents, including five composers in the contemporary and electronic music category (n  =  14), several arts graduates preferring immersive/experimental theatre (n  =  8) and an arts teacher and an arts administrator in the contemporary dance group (n = 8). These practitioners might have had a stronger inclination to construct their narratives around recent events, linked to their own successes rather than their backgrounds, but even with this proviso, contemporary arts were more strongly linked with adult identities than childhood exposure. While some responses resisted the idea of there having been ‘one particular moment’ (NS119) of recognising an interest in their chosen art form, the language of being suddenly ‘converted’ (NS096), ‘almost overnight’ (NS024) was strong amongst many others, who spoke of specific incidents such as being introduced by friends (NS087) and having interests ‘sparked by a visit to the Edinburgh fringe festival’ (NS072). University had been an important site of contemporary arts discovery, including for those who preferred performance art (n = 5), either through study as part of a degree or by attending contemporary arts with university friends: ‘I became interested when a friend began performing [burlesque] as a means of increasing self-­confidence and female empowerment’ (NS031). While the national survey gives only a brief snapshot of the place of the arts in people’s cultural life stories, there is an emerging pattern of discovering contemporary arts in adulthood, which is supported by the more detailed narratives of our interviews (see Section  6.1.3). This presents an important challenge to the prevalent assumptions around access and privilege, showing that it is possible to ‘find’ the arts later in life, even if early opportunities have been more limited. Arts organisations therefore have the chance to seek out new audiences, pursuing the crossover not necessarily from traditional high arts, but from popular culture including music and film (see Section 7.1.4). An essential caveat to this, however, is that education and families still have a vital role to play in developing the creative open-­mindedness necessary to recognise and embrace arts engagement in adulthood. To become ‘interested in less “traditional” and more experimental theatre and performance art’ (NS092) is a sophisticated cultural position, reliant in its own way on foundational arts experiences that have been subsumed by later interests. Equipping young people with the skills to develop their own interests in adulthood is an often-­overlooked benefit of arts education, since it is not easily measured in ways that fit with the monitoring of teaching effectiveness. The contemporary arts enthusiasts in the national survey show how independent tastes can be built upon open-­minded foundations, so showing the balance of formative opportunities with later discoveries and proposing a lifespan approach to understanding routes into arts engagement, now explored further through our interview data.

Routes to engagement in contemporary arts 107 6.1.2  Life stages and priorities

In the same way that audience experience is often misunderstood as being place neutral (see Chapter 4), the position of arts engagement in relation to changing priorities and relationships across the lifespan rarely has a prominent role in audience research. The life-­history interview approach of our pilot study revealed this absence to be a fruitful area for further discussion, as participants shared their stories of their parents’ levels of arts engagement, their own childhood opportunities and the different directions in which these formative experiences had taken them in adulthood. In our other three cities, this approach was focused into one question near the end of the interview, ‘Tell me about how you became interested in the arts?’, which was notable for typically having a two part answer: in most interviews, childhood experiences were recalled first, followed by a narrative of shifting interests as a young adult, often influenced by leaving a home town, embarking on higher education or acquiring a new group of friends with different arts interests. Since we were talking to participants who had maintained a strong place for the arts in their lives, it is not surprising that they credited childhood opportunities with being influential, even if their adult arts activities were quite distinct from those early experiences. Playing a musical instrument was a distinctive feature of childhood mentioned by 52 participants (28%), although accounts of being ‘more enthusiastic than talented’ (Bh40) or having teachers who ‘told [my parents] they were wasting their money’ (Bh32) were more common than continued playing into adult life. In some cases, the outcome of childhood lessons had not been the intended one, as in this account of being ‘forced’ to learn classical music and diverging into another genre: My mum forced me to learn violin and piano when I was 10 and I hated it [but] then I made friends with one of my best mates who was also in a sort of similar situation and then we formed a bond over that and started a band. That’s how, but I’m glad that I was forced to do it because I would have had a totally different life if that hadn’t happened. (Br32) Alongside such changes of direction, participants sometimes admitted to a fluctuating engagement with musical practice, often accompanied by a sense of having missed out on the achievement that might have come with more sustained effort: ‘I did have piano lessons but I couldn’t sustain them because my brain couldn’t cope with the idea of sitting down hour after hour’ (Bh20). Most participants played down their musical achievements but acknowledged the value of having had those opportunities: ‘I was lucky enough to, like, play the violin to a very average standard (laughing) [and] play really badly in a very average orchestra’ (Ld20). Lapsed and latent arts participation has been shown in other studies to provide a strong motivation to engage as an audience member

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(Pitts, 2013), and this self-­styled ‘very average’ violinist was a clear example of someone whose musical passions had been ignited in childhood and then pursued in unpredicted ways: The last year I’ve been to Drum and Bass nights, I’ve been to lots of sort of minimal techno stuff, I’ve been to the opera, I’ve been to see Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, I’ve been to see, seen quite a lot of hip-­hop. . . . I would say I go into classical stuff more solo because I wouldn’t be able to get most of my friends to, if I said they’ll go to the Barbican to see a violin concerto, they’ll be like ‘maybe not’. (Ld20) This participant reflected directly on how the opportunities of childhood music-­making had created a foundation for diverse and extensive engagement as an audience member, since ‘I’ve done the performance-­y bit and now it’s nice to watch the people who are actually talented do it’ (Ld20). Other participants described going back to musical learning later in life, again fuelled by having ‘sowed the seeds of an interest in music’ (Bh19), and so becoming ‘interested in classical music more than I was’ (Ld27). Given that less than half of these participants (n  =  24/52) still played the instrument they learned in childhood, these could be interpreted as stories of musical failure and indeed were presented as such by participants who talked of being ‘completely useless’ (Bh20) and having ‘given it up because . . . I’ve just got too much going on’ (Ld40). However, understood holistically, as part of a life story leading to engaged audience experience as adults, the long-­term and unpredictable consequences of childhood arts opportunities were clearly in evidence, illustrating the lasting impact of formative access to the arts through education and family (and, by implication, the effects of the absence of such opportunities). Beyond musical learning, many participants had a sense of having always been surrounded by the arts ‘in a family where just cultural things are always really encouraged’ (Ld45), and around half of the responses (n  =  96; 51%) referenced their parents’ cultural habits as part of their own narrative. This might be considered a strikingly low number, particularly since some of those references were to parents’ lack of interest and often included a comparison between one parent who was enthusiastic about an art form and another who was not: My dad plays guitar. So I  guess he was quite a big encouraging factor in getting music lessons and stuff. . . . Mum is quite crafty and arty. But I wouldn’t say that, growing up, art was a big part of family life, going to galleries or museums and thing, it’s more like now and again if we were on holiday or something, we’d go to something, but it wasn’t ‒ apart from the music ‒ it wasn’t a huge thing. (Bh38)

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Other participants told stronger origin stories (in this case perhaps more rehearsed than remembered) of the early emergence of arts interests: Erm, (laughing) at the age of two I said to my mum, ‘Mum, can we do Cinderella, dance Cinderella around the living room? I’ll be Cinderella you be everyone else’ (laughing) and she was like, ‘okay’ and the next day it was like, ‘Oh Mum, can we do Swan Lake, I’ll be the swan, you be everyone else’ (laughing). (Br25) This parent’s willingness to join in was one example of how family arts practices were referenced in the interviews, and other participants described parents and extended family playing instruments in the home (n = 21; 11%) or belonging to local amateur dramatics societies (n = 9; 5%). The effects of this were not only to provide role models for lifelong arts participation but also to expose participants as children to live music or theatre very young, as they were taken along to support their parents’ performances: My mum . . . performed in orchestras and plays and got me and my brother into like playing music from a very, very young age. . . . And then mum would play in like the local amateur dramatics, like the band, so we were often going to stuff younger. (Bh16) There were fewer examples of having professional musicians or actors as parents, which has been noted in previous research as a predictor of arts-­focused parenting with high expectations (Davidson & Borthwick, 2002). Only one respondent had ‘[grown] up with opera’ (Br04), as both parents were professional singers, but there were other instances of culturally active parents spotting signs of artistic promise: Everyone in my family is a music nut. And my family is like stupidly artistic. Like, my grandfather’s a poet; my grandmother used to play piano; my mum used to paint, she used to write; my dad used to dance and paint, and play instruments. So, myself and my younger brother are stupidly lucky because we literally got all of that, like, mashed into ourselves. And when I was little, music was always on in the house, but my mum noticed apparently, when I was little, that I had rhythm. Apparently, she’d play music and I’d dance around as a little baby. So when I got to three ‒ ’cos she wanted to give me something to focus on, and a way to help my mind develop and be able to process information quickly, she put me into music lessons. (Bh28) Parental support was also implicit in the extra-­curricular opportunities taken by some participants, and school plays, bands and choirs were remembered as

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strong childhood arts experiences that could be seen as most congruent with the adult roles of participant or audience member that had followed later for many people: When I was at infant school, they used to do a play and they had beautiful costumes. They had fairy costumes with multicoloured wings. That would be when I’d be about five or six, and I always wanted to be a fairy and I only ever got to be a tree! (laughing) That might have been it. Striving to get past the tree stage. (Bh40) Though said in jest, this narrative of adult arts experiences resolving some of the missed opportunities of childhood resonated in many of the interviews and, where relevant, in participants’ own approaches to parenting (see Section 6.2.2) that prioritised sharing enthusiasms and providing opportunities: ‘you sort of come back into art again, almost, in a way, with them, because you’re then creating with your children and introducing them into making things, drawing, painting, modelling, all that sort of thing’ (Bh48). This intergenerational arts engagement had been recognised by some participants in their own childhoods, particularly through involvement in community arts activities, described as: An amazing experience to be with these grown-­ups who were working in theatre and – and making sets and that – that kind of thing, and, erm, yeah, it really opened my world up to, ‘Oh right, okay, this is a possibility.’ (Br37) A few participants described having been given encouragement without necessarily having parental role models: ‘I don’t really know where it has come from in the family, I am the only one who sort of tries to soak up as much [theatre] as I do’ (Br20). Another searched for the word ‘auto-­didactic’ as he described having made a career in the arts despite a family who were ‘not theatre goers . . . not music lovers. . . . I don’t come from a cultural background in any shape or form’ (Ld03). Only two participants described being actively discouraged from pursuing an interest in the arts, by a parent who thought it ‘a total waste of time’ (Bh07). Parental and educational encouragement was therefore valued and appreciated by those who had been fortunate to experience it, but there was also evidence of people finding the arts, and particularly contemporary arts, later in life. The absence of an overwhelming discourse of family background (remembering that half of the participants did not mention parental involvement at all) can be interpreted positively, as showing that there are routes into the arts beyond the usual sites of cultural capital, though the discussion of these stories in the next section will illustrate the high level of personal confidence and cultural awareness needed to find those routes where education and background have not paved the way.

Routes to engagement in contemporary arts 111 6.1.3  From childhood to independence: finding the contemporary

The national survey (see Section  6.1.1) and interview evidence (see Section  6.1.2) illustrate the multiple ways that access to the arts in general was facilitated in either home or school for most participants, and in both for the most fortunate. Some participants spoke directly about how their interests in contemporary arts marked a development from these foundations, as young adult participants started ‘not just going [to galleries] when my parents take me, like, actually going to it by myself ’ (Lv39), and older participants looked for signs of this increasing independence in their own children: Music’s a big thing with my children. One daughter will go around art galleries, the other one doesn’t, literally, which I think is a shame. I’m not sure why she won’t, I don’t know whether it’s because her friends aren’t interested or it’s not cool or . . . I don’t know. I’d love to get young people more into . . . when I was teaching, I would always try and encourage kids to go to . . . the parents wouldn’t take them to anything. So I don’t know what you do about that really, to be honest. (Ld42) This participant, from a teacher’s perspective as well as that of a parent, acknowledged the importance of early access to the arts, even where the outcomes of this exposure are not guaranteed. As a parent who values the arts, she expressed regret that only one of her daughters appeared to be pursuing this interest into adult life, but other responses would give her some comfort in showing that experiences of the arts can take a long time to manifest in sustained attendance habits. One Birmingham participant, for example, spoke of a powerful experience of contemporary dance, which was followed by ‘not being exposed to it for a while’, but which created a route in when later opportunities arose: ‘it’s been quite a recent thing, actually; and it’s purely been because I’ve known where to look for it, I think, [because] my eyes were opened to it’ (Bh44). Musical life histories have previously been shown to benefit from a congruence between arts values in both settings (Pitts, 2012), but again the routes to contemporary arts are distinctive, in that some participants were aware of the disjunction between their family and education environments and perceived their open-­mindedness to the arts to be rooted in this realisation. This participant describes the sudden revelation of going from his working-­class home to grammar school and finding himself in a new cultural world: So, all of a sudden I was plunged from sort of like, a place with no books and like, sneering at you, ‘arty farty’ sort of like . . . – into sort of going to school with people whose parents were like head teachers and who sort of read Orwell, right, you know. ‘Orwell? Who’s that?’ Right. And I was 11. So I had this brilliant thing where sort of like, all of a sudden, all this catch up, this terrible catch up. But it gave me the grounding,

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right, the background I would never have had if I hadn’t have gone to grammar school. (Br44) The moment of revelation on entering a new social and cultural environment came for this participant at the age of 11 and was part of a narrative of privilege and opportunity that had subsequently shaped his views on education and the arts: ‘the problem with grammar schools [is] not that they’re sort of terrible, it’s like everybody should have it’ (Br44). Lack of equality and access was recognised by many participants as being an ingrained problem in the arts, whether their own experience had been favourable or limited, and many people saw improving that access as a clear responsibility for arts organisations as well as for education (see Section 9.1). Participants who linked their arts interests more strongly to their adult years perceived only a tenuous link to childhood experiences: ‘my mum took me to see Swan Lake once, but none of that was . . . I think I would say all of it has developed post-­university’ (Br33). In another similar case, limited arts exposure as a child had been superseded by the far greater opportunities of university life: the participant who ‘[could] not remember going to the theatre a child at all’ had been to ‘play after play after play’ while studying at Oxford, where ‘more or less every college had a production in the summer term’ (Bh04), and had a similar story to tell about her concert-­going history: I remember once as a child we saw Sir Adrian Boult conduct in Canterbury Cathedral. And in my school choir we once went to support a local choir doing the St. Matthew Passion, but my mum said she’d never come again because the seats were so hard. She could take a cushion! So she wasn’t a great musical influence. So I think . . . I think good teachers at school, and just exposure to so much at university, there’s so much there that you could just dip into. (Bh04) Leaving home to pursue higher education or begin a career was a significant point of reappraising arts interests for many participants: acquiring new friends who ‘were really interested in going to museums’ (Br12) or a partner who ‘introduced all the music into our life’ (Br03) might replace the cultural values or absences of the family home environment and so offer a new opportunity to engage with the arts. With word of mouth being a strong means of finding out about the arts (see Section 8.4.2), making attendance decisions as part of a friendship group was widely reported: ‘someone would have said, “Oh, you must go to Birmingham Opera: it’s a really good thing to go to”, and he’d have sorted out tickets and then I would have gone’ (Bh51). Being part of those new friendship groups could also involve a deliberate effort to broaden and deepen arts experiences, as for a participant in Bristol who ‘came here as a student [and] wanted to develop

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an opinion on theatre’ (Br05) and another in London who ‘did theatre at uni and I work in the theatre, so I’ve got friends who are very open and engaged’ (Ld01). Contemporary arts engagement was therefore part of the social identity of many participants, as ideas, knowledge and opinions were expressed within friendship networks: I’ve got a few friends who go to the theatre a lot, um, and we sort of you know, discuss what we’re seeing, and they will say ‘Oh have you been to this?’ and ‘Have you been to that?’, and so that sort of helps. (Ld06) Participants were also clear in their statements of personal identity and individual choice, however, with several reflections on how ‘the older you get, the less you’re worried about being cool and the more adventurous you start being’ (Br44): If certain friends like something, I go, ‘Hmm, very likely that I won’t like that.’ And if certain friends you know, do not like it, I might go, like ‘Ok, that might actually not be such a bad thing to go and watch.’ . . . When you’re younger, you don’t have that, you know – somebody gives a recommendation and you go, and only when you are older do you learn that maybe the person who gives the recommendation, I need to have recommendation about that person as well! (Ld03) While formative arts experiences were therefore undoubtedly influential for most participants, this process of acquiring individual tastes and personal confidence in navigating the arts was an important part of being a highly engaged arts attender. In contemporary arts, particularly, being part of ‘that scene’ (Lv31) was usually a reflective and critiqued position, in which participants recognised both the privilege and the discomfort of being one of the ‘usual suspects’ (Ld02) in the audience: [I’m] part of a privileged bunch of people who are interested in the arts, and so hear more about it and it becomes a bit of a snowball effect and you end up seeing and doing more and becoming more ingrained in those networks and it’s a positive feedback thing I think, so yeah, I don’t know how you’d begin to access it if you were going in cold. Yeah, I think I have a background of participating, of enjoying, of being exposed to it, and . . . I’ve just continued that journey. (Br22) This response captures the essential combination of strong foundations, later opportunities and open-­minded attitudes, while recognising that these potent ingredients are not universally accessible. We found in our interview data that

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there were key points when earlier inequalities could be redressed by accessing the arts as an adult, and so the next section considers the life transitions that allow for a resetting of arts opportunities and attendance habits.

6.2  Life transitions as triggers for arts engagement Our life-­history analysis highlighted not only the lasting effects of formative arts experiences in childhood (see Section 6.1) but also the key life transitions that could prompt a review of arts engagement and sometimes the deliberate changing of habits and priorities. Across all our interviews, participants talked unprompted about the ways that their arts attendance had been altered, recently or over longer periods of time, by circumstances including moving cities, forming new relationships and changing work patterns. These significant life changes are intuitively understood to disrupt social and cultural life in ways that can be both positive and negative: a geographical move might include the loss of established membership of an audience or a form of arts participation, but the arts can in turn be a route into seeking connections and friendships in a new place. Academic research on residential mobility and social capital suggests that ‘in the first years after a move, [people] more strongly and actively invest in building new contacts, until saturation is achieved or until resource constraints (often a lack of time) limit additional investments’ (Nisic & Petermann, 2013, p. 206). However, arts marketing literature and practices seem to make relatively little use of this opportunity to target new arrivals and turn them into audiences other than in the case of ticket offers made to students in university cities (Tajtáková & Arias-­Aranda, 2008). The two life changes that were most prominent in our interview data were retirement (see Section 6.2.1), which had caused participants to reflect on how they were using their available time, and parenthood (see Section 6.2.2), which also prompted a search for new kinds of arts-­related activities. In both cases, conversations included the practicalities of access, cost and suitability of events, with decisions being strongly underpinned by a sense of the importance of the arts for living a fulfilling life. These experiences foreground the contribution of arts engagement to wellbeing and identity for many participants, often communicated strongly in interviews as an essential part of life: the arts are ‘who I am’ (Br13, Ld12). Our analysis of these two life stages shows a heightened sense of the value of the arts to living a meaningful life: whether motivated by the freedom of increased time away from paid employment, or a fear of being consumed by ill health or family responsibilities, these participants hold the arts central to their lives. They also look for opportunities to share this with friends and family, whether to replace relationships previously enjoyed in the workplace or to pass on cultural values to their young children. While not all arts audiences will feel as strongly as these participants, the narratives presented here are a reminder of the emotional impact of attendance in general, which sits alongside the more frequently studied impact of specific events (e.g. Radbourne, Johanson, Glow, & White, 2009).

Routes to engagement in contemporary arts 115 6.2.1  Retirement projects and positive ageing

Retirement was frequently mentioned by our participants, either as a current or impending stage of life (n = 43; 23%), or as a future, somewhat idealised time in which they hoped to address some of the gaps in their arts involvement (n = 7; 4%): ‘if I were retired, I’d be just enjoying my life – great! I can do everything then that I want to do!’ (Ld05). Some recent retirees and older part-­time workers talked about their increased time and reduced demands in exactly these positive terms, feeling able to attend more frequently and flexibly, including making greater use of weekday and daytime opportunities: When we were working full time, we didn’t go up to Shepherd’s Bush in the evening. And then that’s a real rush and a real thing. But we did do it, occasionally. But obviously now we have got more time, which is lovely. So we have to go and see this as a matinee on a Saturday it is a luxury, it’s lovely. It’s really lovely. (Ld07) This participant felt ‘lucky’ to be experiencing the ‘luxury’ of afternoon theatre without pressures of full-­time work, and others expressed similar notions of privilege and gratitude in being able to spend their extended free time ‘[going] to probably everything and anything I can go to, to be honest’ (Ld42). A few acknowledged that it had taken financial planning and good fortune to enable a retirement lifestyle that included a high level of arts attendance: Luckily I  retired early because I  was sensible when I  was younger and I looked after myself, pensions and all this, you know. I’m not rich, but I can manage fine and do all the things we talked about, right. (Br44) Others were not in such a comfortable position and had to balance the equation of ‘more time, less money’ (Ld44): ‘when I’m fully retired, I would like to do more, but whether financially I’ll be able to do more or not, is something I’ll have to work out when I get there’ (Ld06). The narrative of keeping busy and ‘doing much more than I did’ (Ld06) was also prominent in the stories of recent and imminent retirees, such that the quantity of attendance became the measure of a successful retirement: While I was working, I started keeping a computer record of everything I went to. So the 11 years from 1994 to 2006 when I retired, I was averaging 120 concerts a year. Since I retired, I’ve been averaging 200 concerts a year, which is quite a lot. (Bh32) Arts attendance in this case and others helped to provide a routine to replace working life, and to build new social networks, as noted particularly

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by those who had increased their involvement with arts organisations by volunteering: I can now pop into a gallery or two, perhaps more, and feel not that I just have to be looking at the work and then leaving, but I can hang about [and] bump into people that I’ve seen before . . . which is that sense of community that I lost. (Bh43) This volunteer also talked about being ‘out in the world engaging and giving’ (Bh43) and so hinted at the ways in which the purpose and energy of arts attendance might change in retirement, now that it no longer sat alongside paid employment: ‘pre-­retirement, it was more about relaxation, but now I’ve got all that nonsense called work out of my head, I’ve got a lot of room, and therefore I  want to be stimulated’ (Lv10). Volunteering took various forms across our four cities, including membership of gallery visitor panels and the running of an independent cinema in Bristol and the hosting of actors at BE Festival in Birmingham (see Gross & Pitts, 2016). For some participants, this was an entirely unexpected route into the contemporary arts, prompted by community engagement but leading in fulfilling ways to new arts discoveries: I am a landlady . . . [and BE Festival] approached me to be a host. Because of that, I get to know about the festival and go along to see . . . things that we wouldn’t otherwise dream of going to see! (Bh11) Several participants talked, somewhat diffidently, about setting themselves deliberate challenges to extend their arts experiences in retirement: [When you retire] there are two critical decisions to take: am I going to spend the rest of my life watching the TV, or am I not? The first critical decision was no, the TV will be turned off, and that still stands. You then have to take a decision about what you are going to do with your retirement. I spoke to a friend, 10 years ahead of me in terms of retirement, the one thing I would say to you, he said, is ‘Don’t settle’. So some of the stuff I first did, I wouldn’t do, and some of the stuff I do now is new stuff. It was a conscious – that sounds terribly pose-­y – portfolio for retirement. (Bh20) A ‘portfolio’ (Bh20) or ‘project’ (Bh26) for retirement had helped these participants address some of the frustrations of their working years, when they had been aware of arts opportunities going past with no time to attend to them: I always spent, you know, many a day when I was working nine to five just saying when I retired I’m going to do this, that gallery, this music venue,

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I’m going to go and see this group, whatever, whatever, and I feel I’ve kind of ticked things off as I’ve gone along. (Lv09) Expanding arts interests could be an important part of claiming a new identity in retirement, ‘holding on to life and youth and not wanting to be a doddery old lady, not wanting to just be in a comfort zone all the time’ (Bh39). There was also a sense for some people of using their continued good health well while it lasted: ‘before my eyes finally go, I just want to keep looking at nice things’ (Br02), but ‘if you’re looking forward to sitting down, you don’t enjoy an exhibition’ (Lv18). Others had reached the stage where their attendance was curtailed by ill health or lack of available companions, such that choosing an event ‘would depend on physically how difficult it is to get to, whether I can park near it, whether I’m required to stand or walk upstairs or, you know. I’m withdrawing, you know? I just can’t do it’ (Bh18). Enjoyment of arts in retirement was therefore something to be seized upon, both as a route out of full-­time working, and a way of making the most of opportunities: ‘if I wanted to, I could be out every night . . . I’m very lucky to be able to kind of choose stuff’ (Lv31). For all their appreciation of renewed interests and energy for arts attendance in their own lives, some of our retired participants expressed concerns familiar from audience research and arts marketing literature (e.g. Kolb, 2001): Recently we’ve picked up much more because I’m only working two days a week now and my husband’s retired, so we go to loads of things especially daytime things. But we’re always a bit discouraged because it’s always us grey-­haired people. And I always think in Symphony Hall too, that there’s such a lack of younger people and diverse groups of people in Britain in general in concert halls. I always think that’s sad. What’s missing? What is it that doesn’t bring people in? Is it intimidating or is it not the right kind of music to attract people? I don’t know. (Bh54) Theatre matinees were also noted typically to have ‘a coach load of [older] ladies’ (Ld42) in the audience, fulfilling a need for ‘people who do not really like going out at night, but they like going to things’ (Lv20), and it is striking that this is viewed as a problem, even by those within that demographic: ‘now I’m part time, I’ve gone to quite a few matinees and the audience they attract is like me, you know, over 60’ (Ld06). With our interviews showing the strong benefits of arts attendance in retirement, it seems timely to highlight the contradictions within the negative portrayal of elderly audiences and the drive towards supporting ‘positive’ and ‘active’ ageing (Creech, Hallam, Varvarigou, & McQueen, 2014). These ideas exist simultaneously in research and policy agendas but are rarely considered together, possibly because of the difficult overtones of privilege inherent in being able to spend retirement in

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good health and with sufficient funds and time to enjoy the arts. Indeed, when our London arts organisation partners were considering the direction that their action research might take in response to our findings (see Section  10.3.1), working with retired populations was explicitly dismissed as being ‘exactly the audiences that the Arts Council tell us not to develop’ (LonCAN meeting, November 2018). Looking more closely at the experiences of retired audience members might not solve the challenges of increasing diversity or of shifting the notoriously ageing audience profile of classical music to a younger demographic, but it does highlight how arts attendance can improve life, increase open-­mindedness and provide social networks and structures beyond the workplace. The Ages and Stages project at the Victoria/New Victoria Theatre in North Staffordshire, England, is a rare example of practice and research documenting and supporting the ways in which theatre, in this instance, had helped older audience members and volunteers through ill health and bereavement by providing continuity of valued social networks, as well as opportunities to engage with these life challenges through the arts (Bernard et al., 2015). Our findings show how there is further potential to understand the value of arts engagement through the eyes of these older audience members, who articulate and demonstrate the benefits of attendance in ways that are often overlooked in arts marketing. As an example of this transferability of the retired audiences’ view, one participant who had recently changed to part-­time working noted that the wellbeing benefits of the arts would have been even greater if they had been available to counteract the demands of full-­time work: attending lunchtime concerts that had previously been incompatible with her working life, she noted that ‘if they could just time them slightly differently, it would be like an oasis in the middle of your working day’ (Lv20). Indeed, one participant of working age described exactly those benefits from gallery visiting as an antidote to a demanding job: Just before I left the Prison Service, I worked probably 400 yards from The Tate gallery, and if you got bored, or you just wanted to refresh yourself, you could just walk along to The Tate, stay there for half an hour, or an hour, and then go back and you’d be a different person! (Br01) Another described a dance class where she encountered teachers, psychologists and other stressed professionals: We weren’t airy fairy, we weren’t anything like that, we were just escaping the rat run, escaping the nine to five, just needing some sort of creative outlet just to soothe your emotions, you know, get rid of all that mental fluff that you go through every day and I have to admit, if I don’t do it I feel ill. (Br11)

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The benefits of the arts for wellbeing and ‘ageing artfully’ (Cutler, 2009) are increasingly well understood, but there is clearly potential for them to be more joined up with arts marketing approaches so that the experience of attendance and participation is understood as contributing to mentally healthy states and behaviours in the same way that has become commonplace and big business in the streaming of music (Marques & Pimentel Biscaia, 2019). 6.2.2  Arts for children – and their parents

The other demographic group whose arts attendance had often changed suddenly due to life circumstances were the parents of young children, some of whom welcomed our interviews as ‘giving a busy mum the opportunity to just vent!’ (Lv40). Our demographic data did not ask for information on number and age of children, but the effects of parenting on arts engagement were explicitly mentioned by 61 participants (33%), spread across all age groups and with a predictable bias to responses from women (n  =  44). Parents of pre-­ schoolers, most often mothers in our sample (14 responses from women aged