ABSTRACT

Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for 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 audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license here.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

Who goes to the contemporary arts?

chapter 2|22 pages

Understanding audiences

Research methods and approaches

chapter 3|18 pages

‘But is it art?’

Defining the contemporary arts

chapter 4|26 pages

Cities for the arts

The importance of place in audience engagement

chapter 5|24 pages

Art forms, venues and audience decision-making

Navigating the cultural ecology

chapter 7|22 pages

‘It’s okay not to like it’

The appeal and frustrations of the contemporary arts

chapter 8|26 pages

Making sense of the contemporary arts

Programme notes, gallery panels and arts talk

chapter 9|20 pages

Uncomfortable questions in contemporary arts practice and research

The formaldehyde shark in the room

chapter 10|16 pages

Audience development and the future of the contemporary arts

Learning from audiences