ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that twenty-first-century audiences are significantly more heterogeneous than twentieth-century audiences, and that the stark contrast warrants focused study of the complicated ways in which current and future audiences will continue to expand tastes and ways to make meaning with their artistic experiences. Furthermore, this argument recognises that such study will need to embrace the complexity of these phenomena as audiences themselves further collapse disciplinary and modal categories often used by arts professionals and scholars to understand audiences. To accomplish this, the chapter reviews the influence of demographic, socio-economic and cultural shifts on expanding arts audiences’ tastes. Against this backdrop, the purview of empirical understandings of arts audiences is discussed along with its recent evolution, with the last decade being a period of especially rapid evolution, further accelerated at the decade’s close with new and long-standing questions being brought rapidly to the fore by the global pandemic and intensified calls for racial equity. In closing, the chapter highlights how methods and empirical findings implicate contemporary and future audiences, and reflects on the future of arts audiences and audiencing, ultimately offering the possibility of a fuller embrace of cultural equity.
