Essay
Audience engagement as practice: From extraordinary to everyday
Abstract
This essay challenges the conventional view of audience engagement in arts and culture, arguing that it’s more about habitual, everyday processes than the usually highlighted exceptional moments. Current approaches to researching and teaching audience engagement overly focus on one-off events, overlooking broader contexts and long-term habitual practices. Through a practice lens, audience engagement emerges as interconnected, routinized processes within organizations. Changing engagement requires systemic shifts, acknowledging the stability and sociability of practices. Traditional methods of audience research and education must evolve towards deeper qualitative analyses; cultural policy should prioritize meaningful engagement over superficial metrics; and cultural management needs to care for genuine engagement recognizing diverse organizational practices. The essay is a call for embracing the everyday, underreported social interactions that form the true foundation of audience engagement.
Keywords
2024 (1)
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© 2024, Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy
Keywords
- aesthetics
- higher education
- cultural diplomacy
- career, professional role
- audience studies
- visitor motivations
- Business
- corona pandemic
- digitalization, digitization
- diversity
- empirical aesthetics
- entrepreneurship
- development, transformation
- ethics
- Evaluation
- festival
- film
- social change
- ideology
- staging
- communication
- Concert
- creative industries
- creativity
- culture
- arts organizations, cultural organizations
- cultural participation
- cultural change
- fincancing the arts
- cultural history
- cultural economy
- cultural organizations
- art education
- cultural policy
- cultural production
- cultural sociology
- audience development, art education
- arts administration, arts management
- cultural industry
- cultural sciences
- art
- arts research
- arts marketing
- curating
- artists
- leadership
- management
- marketing
- market
- media
- methods development
- museum
- music
- non-visitor studies
- opera
- orchestra
- organization
- audience
- audience development
- law
- government
- social cohesion
- social cohesion
- non-visitor socio-demographics
- community arts
- state
- urbanism
- dance
- Participatory Justice
- theater
- Theatre Governance
- theory development
- tourism
- survey
- civil society, third sector