There’s been a thoughtful discussion lately about whether arts organizations are leading or following their audiences, which they ought to be doing, and whether the two are actually opposites. But a sour note can be heard in that chorus on both sides of the debate: the idea that audience research is a tool for pandering. (Cue the Steve Jobs quote about consumers not knowing what they want.) There’s a better way to think about this.

As usual, some of the most constructive ideas in the conversation have come from Diane Ragsdale (top) and Nina Simon, both of whom see the lead/follow dualism as an oversimplification at best and a self-serving masquerade at worst. From their different vantage points, Ragsdale and Simon suggest that leading and following are necessary aspects of a healthy, mutually responsive relevance that is all too rare among today’s arts institutions.

Simon cites her friend Adam Lerner, head of the MCA Denver and the subject of an admiring New York Times profile a few weeks ago, who wrote in 2008 that art museums should become “less visitor-oriented” and that they’re (in Simon’s paraphrase) “misguidedly searching for direction from audiences.” The answers lie inside the organization, Lerner argued then, not outside: museums “need to look more carefully at themselves.”

I’ve heard a similar view from Martha Lavey, artistic director of the hugely successful Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She has no patience for the fashionable notion that the community should be consulted on artistic matters, at least at her theater (she acknowledges it makes sense for some other kinds of organizations). Lavey has argued — in harmony with Simon and Lerner, I think, and maybe Ragsdale on some level — that Steppenwolf’s job is to give people something that’s valuable to them but comes not from them but from an artistic impulse within the organization and the artists who work with it. Not from a “strategy,” and certainly not from a survey.

That’s the idea arts leaders have in mind when they quote Steve Jobs’s dictum that “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want” and the fact that Apple does no market research. (One of the commenters on Simon’s post sounds this familiar note.)

Except it’s not a fact. It’s one of the self-mythologizing semi-truths about Saint Steve. Apple during his tenure may have had a had a different relationship to consumer research than some companies, but it also had plenty of ways of understanding its customers and their experiences and needs, from user groups and support forums to surveys and “Apple Customer Pulse,” an online feedback panel the company launched about a year ago. It also has a market research department — sorry, Consumer Insights — with a budget we can only guess at. 

Even if we scale Apple way down to the world of art museums and theater companies, that’s far more audience research than most arts organizations have at their fingertips. ...

It’s starting to look like the essence of innovation is seeing new uses for old tools. Take the humble movie theater, once synonymous with watching ... well, movies. But the Met’s Live in HD, and later LA Phil Live concerts, made that assumption look so 20th century. Now a London exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci has come to a theater near you. Will museums become local in a whole new sense? 

You may have heard about the exhibition, at the National Gallery in London, which brings together works of Leonardo’s that have never been in the same place. More likely, you’ve read about the “live,” high-def satellite version playing at select movie theaters around the world, in last week's NY Times review and elsewhere. The program is distributed by the same people who give us the Met broadcasts, high profile theater performances, and the occasional rock concert, BY Experience, self-described “pioneers of global live cinema events.” 

What’s new, obviously, is that this is an exhibition, not a performance. You’re looking at artworks. But you’re also (as with the Met’s and LA Phil’s appealing backstage footage and performer interviews) seeing and hearing far more about the art, the artists, and the exhibition itself than you would while snaking your way through the show at the National Gallery. You get the process, not just the product.

In a way, this is a natural evolution of what museum media and technology people have been trying to get their colleagues elsewhere in the museum field  to do for years: to stop thinking of virtual experiences of objects as a threat to in-person encounters with the real thing — a seductive but empty thrill that competes with the more profound in-person experience — and start seeing them as a way of deepening, extending, and personalizing that live experience. 

Few have argued openly that electronically mediated experiences can be legitimate, stand-alone ways of connecting with art, different from but on a par with seeing the genuine article face to face. 

Yet technological advances are changing that calculus. The advantages of the virtual experience are becoming harder to forget about when you’re standing in a crowd trying to see a painting that you can’t get particularly close to and certainly can’t manipulate (as in Google's Art Project), with no globetrotting curators or famous actresses on hand to talk to you about it with a humanizing passion and wit. “Live” can have more than one meaning.

Not that the Leonardo production — which premiered on February 20 and will be shown again at select theaters through the end of the month — is particularly witty. Picture a cross between an Oscar-night telecast (appropriate, given that you’re in a movie theater) and a PBS great-artist documentary. I’ve been listening to enough science podcasts lately to find the tone here a little precious and self-conscious, as if the museum and the filmmakers are anxious to be taken seriously. (Not something that worries particle physicists, for example.)

But still, this is the proverbial game-changer. Not only has the phrase “traveling exhibition” been given a whole new meaning, economically. Art museums are going to have to join their performing arts cousins in grappling with questions about whether they’re in the business of serving local audiences with traditional, live museum experiences or in the business of serving global audiences with electronically distributed experiences. 

Either way, they’ll have to think very differently about how they’re competing, and for whom. As Alan Brown argues in a forthcoming paper on the evolution of arts venues, local arts organizations may lose audiences as consumers head instead to their local multiplexes to see top-drawer international productions beamed in for a night or two. Institutions that aspire to be those international purveyors (like the LA Phil, pictured) will have to reinvent their business models in a way that embraces — and fully interweaves — local production and international distribution. 

That won’t be easy. But these days, invention is the mother of necessity.

My brain is still buzzing from two days of presentations, conversation, and debate at the second annual Culturelab convening at the University of Chicago. Day One was an invitational affair with a small group of philanthropic and government funders from the US, UK, and Australia. On Day Two we were joined by Chicago-area arts leaders (and some terrific grad students who will become arts leaders) for an "emerging practice" seminar. The heart of the agenda was a debate about technological layering onto arts experiences: enrichment or distraction?

I had assumed the conceptual action would be on Day One, with its big-picture agenda built around the recent supply and demand fracas in the arts (I spoke on the demand side of the equation). The topics for Day Two — technology in the morning, pricing in the afternoon — promised a more tactical discussion.

But things got interesting well before the lunchtime debate between Alan Brown, the well-known arts researcher (and founder of the Culturelab consortium), and Martha Lavey, the much-admired artistic director of Steppenwolf Theater, about whether audiences should be able to use their mobile devices during performances. Ron Evans (at left) gave a witty and eye-opening talk [pdf] about mobile interactivity and augmented reality, including a card-game app from the Tate Modern in which visitors (you have to be at the museum to play) pick artworks that they think would win in a fight if the works came to life and started brawling with each other.

You could hear the uneasy chuckles in the room: Sounds clever, but is that how we want people engaging with Art?

Evans was followed by another bright young light in the world of social tech: Devon Smith, who talked about foursquare and its current and potential uses in the arts. Among her examples: an art-treasure hunt and exhibition held last year in New York called Mission: Edition, from an art gallery interested in what it calls “psychogeography.” Not surprisingly, the Brooklyn Museum is also on Smith’s foursquare A-list.

What I began to realize, listening to Evans, Smith and others talk about technologies as simple as supertitles and as sophisticated as this amazing dance interactive, is that what’s “augmented” about these arts experiences is the social connection. There’s someone talking to you. Or you’re talking to someone. You’re not alone. ...

Unless you’ve been vacationing on Saturn’s moon Titan, you’ve probably heard about the flap over NEA chairman Rocco Landesman’s suggestion, at a conference back in January, that since nonprofit theaters (and by extension the rest of the arts) can’t expect to build demand, they’d better start thinking about reducing supply. Some sharp questions have been raised in the ensuing debate, and they’re on my mind because I’ve been asked to talk about demand-building at a symposium later this month.

I wasn’t going to blog about the Landesman kerfuffle since everyone else did. (By the way, why are there so many fun words for this kind of communal dismay and debate? I could have said brouhaha, hullabaloo, ruckus, or dustup.) When I first heard what he had said, it seemed like such a patently self-defeating position. Of course the arts can build demand, I thought; to say otherwise is to throw up our hands (not to mention our marketing budgets) and go home. Forget every outreach and education program, forget audience research on needs and perceptions, forget innovation, forget participatory experiences, social marketing, collaboration, pricing…

But wait a second. Haven’t we been doing all that, and doing it with increasing sophistication and funding and a quiver full of new technological arrows? Yet the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and plenty of other evidence tell us it’s not working (not for the performing arts, at least, although art museum attendance appears to be holding steady). When I started laying out for my talk all the ways that the arts and culture sector works to stimulate demand, and thinking about how few of those ways actually seem likely to grow the audience overall, I found I had more sympathy with Rocco’s point than I realized. ...