Wednesday, April 1, 2009

I got engaged!

Audience Engagement is the new black.

Mellon is doing their Project Audience.
DanceUSA is doing their Engaging Dance Audiences.
Misnomer Dance is doing their Audience Engagement Project.

And here too is the City of Brotherly Love's (aka Philadelphia's) Audience Engagement research tool. I dig it, I do....

As they say, "the Cultural Engagement Index (CEI) is a new research tool that will enable the cultural community to track trends in consumer cultural engagement over time. The first CEI survey was conducted during the summer of 2008 and its findings were released in March 2009."

And as my super astute pal Morgan von Prelle Pecelli wrote to me:
"I don't know that the findings are necessarily surprising, but the shift [the shifting lens from "arts" to "culture"] .... makes me wonder about how the contemporary performance spaces/artists can position themselves in relationship to this shift. Does it mark a push to break-down the divide between "professional artist" and "hobby artist" or does it mark a push to re-value the hobby artist as a way to increase engagement in professionally planned/created events as audience members? Or does it simply recognize the anarchic proliferation of the means to production (i.e. Youtube, iTunes, IMovie and Garageband make it so anyone can make art and get it out there)? How does the person who makes art as a personal practice fit into our communities?"

Check out Morgan here

On another note: Can't we all get engaged together? Polyamory project management? Pool our $ and our precious human resources and attack the problem from the same unified front? Next on my dream list is "speed dating philanthropy"! Forget patient capital, venture philanthropy etc...give me SPEED DATING PHILANTHROPY!!

I am naive perhaps.

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