Audience Development and Cultural Policy

By Steven Hadley

Encouraging more – and different – people to attend the arts remains a vital issue for the cultural sector. The question of who consumes culture, and why, is key to our understanding of the arts. This book examines the relationship of audience development to cultural policy and offers a ground-breaking perspective on how the practice of audience development is connected to ideas of democratic access to culture. Providing a detailed overview of arts marketing, audience development and cultural democracy, the book argues that the work of audience development has been profoundly misunderstood by the field of arts management. Drawing from a rich range of interviews with key individuals in the audience development field, the book argues for a re-conceptualisation of audience development as an ideological function of cultural policy. Of importance for students, academics and researchers working in arts management and cultural policy, the book is also vital reading for anyone working in the arts, cultural and heritage sectors with an interest in understanding how our relationship with the audience has been constructed.

      

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030629700

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

S. HadleyAudience Development and Cultural PolicyNew Directions in Cultural Policy Researchhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62970-0_1

Chapter 1: Introduction

Steven Hadley¹  

(1)

Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

Steven Hadley

Email: [e-mail]

There is no such thing as the audience for the arts. There are, of course, gatherings of people—conspirators—who come together for a period, usually of ninety minutes or so, to ‘breathe with’ one another, as the etymology of the Latin conspirare has it. Some are delighted. Some are there willingly, some begrudgingly; some under forms of filial, familial and marital coercion. Some will leave at the interval; some will give a standing ovation at the end. Many will complain about the queues for both the bar and toilets.

We know, from a range of statistical sources, that the people who attend the subsidised arts are predominantly a particular demographic, and that overall their attendance is relatively infrequent. Equally, there is a significant proportion of the public who are, to use Alan Feld et al.’s (1983) phrase, ‘patrons despite themselves’ as taxpayers who subsidise, but do not consume, the arts.

The idea of ‘the audience for the arts’ serves many practical and conceptual functions, several of which will be discussed through the course of this book. Marketing—and by proxy arts marketing, oxymoronic as that phrase is—makes no sense without the construction of the audience, or market. Marketing is a transactional profession, and whilst over time the idea of what is involved in that transaction has varied and evolved, there is an implicit duality, whether that be transactional, relational, co-created, monologue, dialogue, based on product or experience.

The idea of ‘audience’ implies a power imbalance. For too long, too much of the cultural sector has failed to speak truth to power. Too often, the cultural sector—in terms of artistic peer-referentiality, its marketing and communications and sector advocacy—talks only to itself, in its own language. The cultural sector talks only to itself because it is power. We must seek to dissemble the imbalance in the idea of having an audience with the artist. The power asymmetry, which sits embedded in so many of the behavioural codes of cultural consumption, must be overcome, concomitant as it is with the hierarchies of value implicit in systems of public subsidy. The emancipated audience.

For the cultural sector, part of the function of the idea of ‘the audience’ is to assist in the maintenance of narratives. In this case, narratives are stories the sector tells itself about its value, impact, social role and, of course, audience. These narratives run deep, based as they are in a rich sociocultural history entwined with the perceptions of autonomy, prestige and self-actualisation (Dubois 2016) which careers in the cultural sector are perceived to confer and what Pierre-Michel Menger (1999, p. 555) refers to as ‘psychic income’.

I want to touch briefly on three examples from my own professional career in audience development, which highlight (to my mind at least) some of the issues which arise when the narratives upon which the cultural sector sets sail encounter empirical icebergs. These icebergs are, in my experience, predominantly related to data. Amongst the many development narratives used to chart the cultural sector over the past twenty or so years, the focus has predominantly been on topics such as leadership, fundraising, and varieties of audience participation (education, outreach, social inclusion, diversity). Too little has been written on the impact of data on the cultural sector.

The impact of data in the arts has arisen from both endogenous and exogenous sources. Exogenous forms, such as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport’s (DCMS’s ) Taking Part data in the UK and, in the performing arts most explicitly, endogenous data from increasingly sophisticated box office software have been key. This data has self-evident implications at a macro, policy level but also somewhat more covert institutional and organisational implications at a meso and micro level which may never escape the confines of board and senior management team meetings. Yet every arts marketer worth their salt has a story of how data they have presented has questioned organisational thinking and challenged the narratives upon which such thinking is based. These themes, of narrative, challenge and belief, are constant throughout the later chapters of the book and form its core conceptual structure.

The three examples. The first occurred in a regional producing theatre. I had been busy all morning examining the customer data held on the box office system. Nobody had done this before, despite the (not inexpensive) system having been in place for several years. In a manner many arts marketers will recognise, the system was used not to produce insights from the data in order to develop a sophisticated CRM model, but to print tickets and, occasionally, labels for mailings. I discovered that the system had over 30,000 accounts registered, and though many were duplicated or incomplete, that was still a sizeable—and useful—database. The chair of the theatre’s board, however, found me an unwelcome presence and was suspicious of what I might find and, thereby, propose. He had no idea what data was stored in the software, and in fairness this was because no one in the team reporting to the board had any clue either. On challenging me as to what I was doing, he announced, I don’t need you to tell me who my audience is. I’m here on every opening night and before the show starts, I go onstage, put my head round the curtain and have a good look.

The second story occurred many years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe. I was walking to the Pleasance Courtyard to meet friends. On the way there—all in the space of ten minutes—I was handed, by various street promotional teams, three of my favourite things: a copy of The Observer newspaper, twenty Marlboro Lights and a voucher for a free pint of Guinness. It is hard to articulate the vexed sense of joy and entrapment I experienced sat in the Scottish sunshine at a picnic table in the courtyard, drinking my Guinness, reading my paper and smoking my free tabs. It was possibly one of the happiest moments of my life, and I’m now married with two children. In those days I was poor, and free things had a whole other ordnance of value. Nonetheless, I felt thoroughly ‘marketed to’. Data had been analysed, segments had been developed, products had been targeted. Ruthlessly efficient and effective. Except, of course, I already bought those three products on a (very) regular basis anyway, so I was already the audience. And no data had been captured, so the marketers had no idea who I was, nor that I lived in Manchester and would not in fact return to Edinburgh for another fifteen years. I’ve since given up smoking.

The Dubliners. When I worked in the marketing team at Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool, The Dubliners were something of an institution. They played at the hall on the Saturday of the Grand National weekend, year in, year out, and every year the audience for The Dubliners, these loyal, repeat bookers, would duly show up. Over many years the audience numbers showed only minor variation, usually hovering around the 550–600 mark, which for a hall with the capacity of the Phil wasn’t ideal, but the finances made sense, and everyone was happy. When I came into post, I ran the data on who this audience was with a view to seeing whether we had reached a natural organic limit or whether additional marketing spend might produce a profitable return. The reality, that there was no audience as we narrated it, quickly became apparent. From one year to the next, less than 5% of the bookers were the same. And across all years that we had data for, this pattern remained constant. Even looking at multi-year attendance across a span of nearly a decade, less than 3% of bookers would attend, maybe take a year off, and then come again. To be clear, 3% of 600 is 18 people. So, whilst there was an audience for The Dubliners, it wasn’t quite the same as the one staff narrated for themselves. The story we told ourselves about the audience was wrong.

This slightly rambling autoethnographic introduction of anecdotal and personal experience is by way of introducing the wider cultural, political and social meanings and understandings which I will explore in this book, by examining audience development in the context of cultural policy. The book offers a narrative of audience development, its relationship to cultural policy and its place in wider debates over democracy and democratisation. It articulates a series of interventions from both practice and research which shed new light on the conception and practice of ‘audience development’ and disrupts the idea of a linear narrative of development within the management function of developing audiences for the arts.

There is no straight line in the narrative of how audience development came to be a globally recognised practice in arts and cultural management. This is at least partly because the history of arts marketing/audience development sits in the pre-digital, and so remains dispersed in personal hard-copy archives, and because the practice has been the subject of limited academic research despite being the focus of considerable sector attention and funding. As such, any narrative is inevitably messy and ambiguous. Ambiguity may be considered a structural characteristic of the cultural sector and as a deliberate policy choice in conditions of uncertainty or dissension (Gray 2014). The unstable combination of ‘culture’ and ‘audience’ offers us a field of study which is—to use the Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s phrase—‘incorrigibly plural’. For the purposes of this book then, all explanations are conceived as narratives, based on contingent and often unintended or unforeseen outcomes.

As became obvious during the writing process, the book uses a study of audience development to make a wider political point about the distribution of power, resources and, ultimately, cultural authority in the subsidised arts sector. The title of this work, then, might well have been ‘Audience Development and Democratic Cultural Policy’, concerned as it is with the a priori relationship between audience development and the ethos embedded in the strictures and structures of cultural policy in a UK (or, more globally, post-Keynesian) model of arts subsidy. Whilst the focus of the book is on the relationship between audiences, management and policy in an English context, the framing of the book is intended to be applicable globally. Whatever the global, national or local context, relationships with audiences are always deeply ideological and never merely a function of management processes.

If audience development is about democratising the arts—whether that be concerned with the means of cultural production and/or consumption—then we might start with a straightforward observation. Anything in need of democratisation is, by definition, undemocratic.

What Is Audience Development?

Audience development is a planned, organisation-wide approach to extending the range and nature of relationships with the public, it helps a cultural organisation to achieve its mission, balancing social purpose, financial sustainability and creative ambitions (The Audience Agency 2016)

Audience development embodies the aspiration of cultural policy to deliver a different (more ‘democratic’) material reality in the consumption of the publicly funded arts. This moral imperative is embodied in any system of public cultural subsidy operating in a modern liberal democracy and is frequently realised as a series of egalitarian objectives concerned with the widening of access to culture and the arts. That these concepts remain to a significant degree aspirational is an ongoing cause for concern.

The imperative to ensure equality of access to publicly funded culture is manifest in both the founding charter of the dominant institution in the English field, the Arts Council,¹ and in its array of policy, consultancy, reporting and strategy documents. The founding Royal Charter of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB 1946 my emphasis) stipulated specific requirements for the new body:

For the purpose of developing a greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the fine arts exclusively, and in particular to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public throughout Our Realm, to improve the standard of execution of the fine arts …

Seventy years later, Arts Council England’s guiding strategy document was titled ‘Great Art and Culture for Everyone’ (ACE 2013). This ideology of the democratisation of culture has also recently appeared in ‘The Culture White Paper’ (DCMS 2016) with its language of ‘reaching out’ and ‘increasing access’.

Whilst the post-WWII cultural dispensation reflected a new welfare state mentality predominant within British politics, this new approach of democratising culture and seeking to ensure availability did not, it transpired, ensure accessibility. As the opening line of Jennie Lee’s (1965, p. 5) White Paper, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’ stated, The relationship between artist and State in a modern democratic community is not easily defined. More so, perhaps, the relationship between art, state and audience, which this book will consider. For whilst the sociocultural goals and guiding governance frameworks of our funding institutions are ostensibly democratic, these goals frequently bear little relation to the reality of their distribution of funds. Jennie Lee’s ‘A Policy for the Arts’ called for the definition of the arts to be broadened to embrace the principle of universal access, but the difference between principle and practice remained largely unaltered (Lewis 2014). As an institution, the Arts Council is the vehicle by which social and cultural practices are organised and co-ordinated for only a small percentage of the population.

Inequalities of cultural consumption are reflected in the Warwick Commission’s (Neelands et al. 2015) Report on the Future of Cultural Value which offered a new segmentation of cultural consumption. Based on DCMS’sTaking Part ² data, the Commission’s report showed that the two most highly culturally engaged groups accounted for only 15% of the general population and tended to be of higher socio-economic status. The wealthiest, better educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the population formed the most culturally active segment of all. Between 2012 and 2015 they accounted (in the most conservative estimate possible) for at least 28% of live attendance to theatre, thus benefiting directly from an estimated £85 per head of Arts Council England (ACE) funding. This, to quote the Warwick Commission report (Neelands et al. 2015, p. 34), suggests that low engagement is more the effect of a mismatch between the public’s taste and the publicly funded cultural offer—posing a challenge of relevance as well as accessibility.

As was evident in 1946 and remains pertinent now, if subsidised cultural forms are to move beyond the confines of established patterns of cultural consumption then intervention is required. The primary focus of this book is, therefore, an empirical investigation into, and subsequent analysis of, cultural policy and practice in order to gain an understanding of the broader rationale for, and implications of, the inception of the audience development agenda.

In order to consider this question, the book investigates how discourses of democracy function within the general field of cultural policy, and more specifically how democracy as a discourse can seek to legitimate the practice of public subsidy and simultaneously perpetuate vested interest. To frame this discussion the book uses a conceptual framework of the democratisation of culture and cultural democracy. An analysis of the practical and ideological function of audience development is based on qualitative research interviews which examined the understandings, beliefs and meanings of those key practitioners engaged in the formation of audience development as a practice in the subsidised cultural sector. The book argues that the relationship of ideas of democratisation to audience development is contextually dependent upon an a priori set of beliefs and uses the model of traditions (Bevir and Rhodes 2002) to explain this.

Audience development is an under-researched field in cultural policy. The book argues, however, that audience development constitutes the first substantive demand-side initiative to occur within the history of post-war English cultural policy. Moreover, audience development was the first proactive attempt to democratise the arts which considered the audience rather than the art. The book argues further that the view, advanced by authors such as Nobuko Kawashima (2000) and Egil Bjørnsen (2011), which depicts audience development as a process, or tool, of the democratisation of culture is both simplistic and reductive.

This introductory chapter, therefore, aims to situate audience development within the field of cultural policy and to make the case for audience development as an object warranting further study from both practitioner and academic. It is hoped that the book will be as useful to those working in arts management as it is to those studying arts management. Over the course of undertaking the research which informs the book, it became clear that a lack of knowledge of cultural policy history—in both the arts management and arts funder arenas—was a considerable issue when it came to both situating policy in a historical context and avoiding (to use a metaphor which remains disappointingly relevant to the cultural sector) ‘reinventing the wheel’.

To the limited extent that audience development has been considered within the cultural policy literature, it has largely been construed as a process-oriented technical function of marketing management, albeit one with a wider social remit. The book argues that audience development should properly be considered as an ideological project situated within the wider policy discourse of democratisation. To do this, the argument presented here links audience development to cultural policy through the twin discourses of ‘the democratisation of culture’ and ‘cultural democracy’. This enables us to understand how a strategic discourse such as the democratisation of culture is legitimated by the practice of audience development. Situating audience development within such a conceptual framework allows a critical discourse to be developed within which the empirical research which underpins the book’s arguments took place. In investigating both the formation of audience development practice and, importantly, specific elements of that practice, the book offers a new understanding of audience development which has implications both for cultural policy research and the wider project of democratisation. To expand on this topic, I will therefore briefly consider questions around democracy, audience and definition. This chapter closes by outlining the main rationale for the book and giving a summary of the following chapters.

The Problem of Democracy

The roots of British cultural policy were laid in the 1940s. Whilst certain organisational mechanisms have undergone change and the sector has witnessed the development of new managerial strategies, the underlying themes of this cultural policy have remained by and large constant (Gray and Hugoson 2004; Gray 2000). From the beginning of WWII, serious attempts were made to imbue all sections of the population (both conscripted and civilian) with the democratic values which, it was suggested, Britain was fighting to defend. Inherent in those values were national traditions of art and culture (Mulgan and Worpole 1986). The essence of our understanding of a cultural policy founded within the post-WWII model of state spending on public goods, and thus subsequently funding for cultural production and consumption, finds its modern incarnation in both Arts Council England’s (ACE 2013) strategy Great Art and Culture for Everyone and Let’s Create (ACE 2020) with their titular themes of production and consumption, excellence and access, culture, democracy and creativity.

Whilst the philosophical and ideological dimensions of the debate between culture and democracy are argued over by cultural historians and cultural policy researchers, the matter is a far from recondite affair. Questions about culture are questions about freedom and power (Holden 2010). The predominant mode of operation for English cultural policy in this regard has been the democratisation of culture. This is, in crude terms, a top-down, state-led approach which operates on the basis of received ideas of both the definition and value of culture. Its main issue, or cause for concern, side-stepping for the moment issues relating to the validity of its premise, has perpetually been that of a seeming reluctance on behalf of the public to engage in this democratisation process in the appropriate manner.

The Problem of Audience

Since the establishment of funding for the arts after WWII, providing access to the arts to as wide a range of the public as possible has, at least in theory, been a major goal of English cultural policy (Kawashima 2000). This book then, focusses on a particular aspect of the varied goals that a democratic cultural policy might pursue, namely greater equality of access to cultural consumption. In the field of publicly subsidised culture, the issue of cultural inequalities is central to the definition of cultural policies. If, as Bjørnsen (2011, p. 1) states, the democratisation of culture is "the definitive goal of culture policy" (emphasis in original), then any practice specifically designed and funded to achieve the goal of cultural democratisation is a valuable object of study for the field of cultural policy.

Justin Lewis and Toby Miller (2003, p. 3) argue that we have on the whole, a culture chosen and defined by cultural elites, for an audience with the requisite cultural capital. Public subsidy for these (usually ‘high’) art forms is most often found to be in inverse proportion to the level of public consumption (Looseley 1995). Whilst it is clear that cultural engagement remains highly unequal, in their book Cultural Policy David Bell and Kate Oakley (2014) argue that public policy has done little to successfully combat this. Yet, if cultural policy assumes that culture is important, then it surely must concern itself with serious inequalities in access. Related to this debate is the question as to whether cultural policy should encourage citizens to take part in particular sorts of activities. Many global cultural policy models contain an implicit hierarchy of cultural value , which may be seen to imply a de facto need to change the cultural tastes of the population. Alternatively, it may imply that cultural policy should simply try to vary our cultural diet (Bell and Oakley 2014, p. 20).

In the context of this book, questions about democratic access to culture are questions about audience development. Arguments about audience development go to the heart of questions about the role of state intervention in art and culture. Whilst the rationales driving cultural policy vary in relation to time, place and political context, the book argues that certain principles pertain to the use of public funds in democratic societies. The processes and practices of the democratisation of culture simultaneously seek to both democratise the culture in question and legitimate its undemocratic nature. In considering audience development as such a practice, the following chapters interrogate audience development as a management function which appears to proactively (on both a practical and ideological level) attempt to actualise the democratisation of culture.

The Problem of Definition

Audience development can be defined in multiple ways and the term has a broad range of meanings. It emphasises a certain democratising intent (Romanello 2013) and a strong participatory spirit (Simon 2010) which goes beyond the concept of just audience building (Bamford and Wimmer 2012, p. 9) and which, in recent iterations can embrace related terms such as engagement, enrichment and recruitment (Walmsley 2019). There is, then, a degree of conceptual ambiguity in such terminology (Maitland 2005) and a formal definition of audience development remains elusive.

What makes this level of ambiguity more intriguing is the sense that by the latter half of the 1990s, audience development had become the mantra of arts and museum practitioners (Hayes and Slater 2002, p. 1) and was the political flavour of the month (Kawashima 2000, p. 7). Whilst , as Maitland (2005) notes, the degree of conceptual fluidity appending to audience development is acknowledged, the literature addresses neither causation nor consequence regarding this degree of ambiguity. Equally, the issue then arises as to how such ambiguity might be reconciled with situating audience development in a cultural policy context.

Conceptual Framework

To contextualise the arguments in this book, the cultural policy debate around the democratisation of culture and cultural democracy is used as a conceptual framework. This framework enables us to analyse the inception of audience development as a management practice within the subsidised arts sector and to undertake a critical interrogation of the concept in order to understand audience development via the individual actors involved in its creation. Inherent in this approach will also be an investigation into the way audience development sought to influence behaviour and taste, and the participants’ understanding of the underlying rationale of such an approach. The book therefore does not seek to explain what audience development is, but rather to gain an empathetic understanding of why the research participants believe audience development is as it is.

If audience development is about developing infrastructure around practice and (perhaps more importantly) data, then it seeks to create norms, benchmarks and templates and to standardise at a sectoral (and thus national) level. As such, it may be seen to demand quantification and the reconciliation of the abstract and creative with the parameters of New Public Management. As an object of study, audience development may then be considered as a policy delivery mechanism of the state, and in a Foucauldian sense as a technology of power (Burchell et al. 1991). Nikolas Rose (1999) describes technologies of power (institutions, policies and norms) as processes designed to shape the behaviour of a population, including any institution that shapes behaviour (e.g. a school or prison). For example, the manner in which specific DCMS directives encouraged the arts sector to promote inclusion implied a move towards a new form of arts management, one that followed on from the ‘New Public Management’ that began in the 1980s (Selwood 2002; Belfiore 2004).

Michel Foucault’s (1991) theory of ‘governmentality’ is directly related both to how people act, and are expected to act, in society. In this sense, the art of governing occurs through various social policies, institutions and ideologies. Governmentality can be understood as the way governments try to produce the citizen best suited to fulfil those governments’ policies, and the organised practices (mentalities, rationalities and techniques) through which