ABSTRACT
Inevitably, we have concentrated in recent chapters upon the arts audience that is most visible, the audience that gathers in a public venue. Yet, elsewhere, there is a larger arts audience, beyond the immediate control of the arts administrator. That is the audience which listens to music on radio, tapes and compact disc, which enjoys drama at home in the form of the classic TV serial or the rented video, and which looks at prints and photographs, not in a gallery, but on the walls of the living room. For the same reason, readers of the 60 000 and more new books that are published in Britain each year also tend to be ignored when ‘arts audiences’ are counted, because people generally read books at home, and not in a public place where they can form part of an economic statistic. Yet, however difficult it may be accurately to quantify domestic arts activity, it is certainly the case in Britain that many more people enjoy the arts in their own homes than in public venues, and that this is at least as important a part of ‘the arts’ as the public activities regularly tabulated in official statistics.
