by Heidi K. Rettig
Arts organizations and cultural policy researchers spend a great deal of time thinking about patterns of arts participation. According to several reports, audiences for the arts are shrinking and there is cause for concern about the future of arts and culture for the next generation.
Consultants scramble to provide solutions to the problem (audience engagement, community building), but we haven’t [yet] seen change of any significance. Museums, theatres, and orchestras still struggle to meet payroll, and the consultants soldier on doing the same thing over and over again with just enough success to sell the ideas to the next organization.
As an applied anthropologist, concepts of personal and geographic time and the impact of new technologies on society are concepts that fascinate me. I’ve been working on understanding how time and technology shape arts participation decisions and hope to present this work at the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in Seattle next spring.
In the field, we talk a lot about the way we can use technology to engage audiences, but we don’t generally think much about how technology outside the theatre is shaping experience of those inside the doors. And we don’t acknowledge that the concept and availability of time – out-of-work, in-school, and out-of school – has radically changed over the past ten years.
Watch Stanford University Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) Philip Zimbardo explain these concepts in this simple, wonderful video from RSA Animates.
