I've written a bit here about the downsides of our highly professionalized cultural sector (the lack of passion, personality, and sense of community). Is it my imagination, or is the non-professional side of the arts becoming bigger and healthier while the professional institutions continue to struggle? 

Okay, that’s a little black-and-white. The two can coexist, of course, and they’re even necessary to each other (which I'll come back to in a moment). But there's more evidence every day that non-professional approaches are succeeding in new ways, and in new corners. Consider what caught my eye when I came back after the July 4th weekend and leafed through a few days’ worth of the New York Times:
 

• An article about a cool place in Brooklyn called the 3rd Ward, which appears to be a blend of arts collective, small-business incubator, design and craft workshop, DIY school, and party venue. Which spawned a restaurant. “True to their mission, they created a real community,” says someone from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce in the article, and it sure sounds that way: the people who use the space are all members, and they range from amateurs taking a woodworking class to established designers, craftsmen, artists, and entrepreneurs. 
  
  So the hobbyists and the pros work side by side in an atmosphere where that distinction isn’t particularly relevant. Which may be why the 4-year-old experiment is such a success. “Demand was so great that last year 3rd Ward opened its overflow space in Williamsburg, across from where its Goods restaurant now sits.” This will be my first stop next time I’m in New York.

• An interview with Gareth Malone, host of “The Choir,” a BBC reality show in which Malone struggles to create top-tier choirs and opera singers of kids from the most unlikely, hardscrabble schools. Like the meteorically popular American show, Glee, Malone’s show presents music as something everyday people do, not just highly-paid virtuosos in tuxedos. There’s music in all of us, it seems to say: we don’t have to farm it out to professionals.
  
  And like the much-discussed Venezuelan model of music education, el Sistema, The Choir has a deep social agenda. The lives of a few young participants on the show have apparently been transformed, not by eat-your-vegetables exposure to classical music’s greatness but by the hard work and sheer heart involved. “[R]eally, it’s about getting people to aspire to come together to learn something,” says Malone.

• A roundup of big issues in the design field today, in which the biggest of them all is how to “empower” people to contribute to the design of the things they use: in other words, “co-designing, customization, design democracy, participation, individualization and whatever else it is called.” Some museums have begun thinking about their exhibitions in just that way, thanks largely to Nina Simon’s work on participatory cultural experiences. (Her blog and new book will be of interest to all kinds of people in the arts and culture, not just museum professionals). ...

You may remember a quote from Holly in my recent post about “pipeline” vs. “parallel” strategies for young artsgoers. Holly knows this turf far better than I do: she runs Seattle Center Teen Tix, a thriving program that lets teens buy $5 tickets to almost any arts organization in the Seattle area. And she has a secret wish.

Guest blogger Holly Arsenault is the program manager of Seattle Center Teen Tix and has taught theater and writing to students from kindergarten through college. She is also a playwright and dramaturg. I asked her whether engaging young people requires a shift in artistic programming to accommodate their distinct needs, or whether we can attract them to existing programming with targeted marketing messages, social events before or after the program, etc. Here’s her full response:

Ha! Yes. That is the question. I’ve always said (actually, I’ve rarely said, but I’ve always thought) that my secret, subversive goal with Teen Tix was to drag the median age of Seattle arts audiences down enough that it would start to have an impact on programming.

I’ll tell you this: if you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales to teens as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent, but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is.

Nor would I want to. The last thing you want is to convince a young person to go see something by claiming that it’s something that it’s not, then have them bored or alienated by the experience. So, despite our success at growing this audience, I do spend a lot of time wishing that I had better (meaning: more youth-friendly) material to work with.

That said, I do find that teen audiences, particularly at the younger end of the age spectrum, tend to be more conservative in their tastes than you might expect. I think some of them have a preconceived notion of what an arts experience should look like, and they like to have that notion confirmed before they become interested in branching out and trying new things. ...

I was in Seattle last week for meetings with a few of our arts clients and attended a terrific brainstorming session about developing teen and young-adult audiences. I came in — and left — with a big question about the limits of marketing to meet the challenge.

The session was set up for us to generate ideas about how to attract more young people to the organization’s performances. At the outset, those performances were treated as a given; the question was how to enhance the desire to have those arts experiences among the target age groups.

But, tellingly, the ideas that began zinging around the room were about changing the nature of those experiences — about new approaches to programming and the artistic “product” onstage, but also about venue, format, before-and-after events, audience behavior, overall vibe, and many other aspects outside the control of the organization’s marketing department.

A few people in the room made the point explicit: No matter how clever your marketing communications are, no matter how technologically and socially networked your message is, if the experience you’re offering isn’t perceived as enjoyable by young people, they won’t come...or won’t come back. Marketing alone can’t do the trick. It’s the programming, stupid.

To quote my newfound Seattle colleague Holly Arsenault, who runs Seattle Center Teen Tix and wrote me an email after the brainstorming session:

If you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our [teen] members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent . . . but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is — nor would I want to. ...

I’ve got a lot of blog-catching-up to do, and I’ll start with a few ideas I heard in Los Angeles this week at the American Association of Museums gathering. As some of you know, I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of subjectivity in cultural institutions, and I was happy to hear several speakers strike the same note.

Subjectivity is one of those ten-gallon abstractions, but I just mean the human, personal presence that animates an act of communication — say, a museum exhibition or a symphony performance.

That presence can be felt on at least three different levels. If the story is about Einstein’s discovery of special relativity, the storyteller might emphasize the subjectivity of the “characters” in the drama: Einstein’s struggles, feelings, thought process, beliefs, or the way he burst into the apartment of his friend Max Born to share a realization that had just clicked. I find this kind of subjectivity more common in science books than science museum exhibits, which tend to be more about concepts than scientists. But we do see a little of it.

Or the storyteller could emphasize the audience’s subjectivity — the responses, feelings, beliefs, and ideas in our minds as we take in the story. Museums have been doing this since the dawn of interactive museum displays, but exhibits like “You! The Experience” (at Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry) and the rise of participatory, co-created experiences show how comfortable museums have gotten with the subjectivity of their visitors.

But what about their own subjectivity? What about the feelings, commitments, attitudes, and plain old human personality of the storyteller(s)? In our Einstein example, how does the “author” (of a book or any other form of cultural communication) connect to this story? What does it mean to her, and how and why did she come to know it? ...