Audience

Who is it for?

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

—Kurt Vonnegut

The concept of an audience helps us explore the interaction between what we do and how it is experienced.

The artist creates a work, but the audience brings its own experience to interpreting it. Iris Murdoch explains, “this…is one of the deep attractions of art, that it gathers together the personality of the creator and the personality of the reader or spectator into a sense of unified significance which may, of course, be very momentary.”

Anticipating the audience greatly impacts what an artist produces. The audience is both the group for which the artist creates their work and the group that chooses to consume it. Although works of art may appeal to unexpected groups, artists tend to have a specific group of people in mind when creating, and they target their work toward what that audience is likely to enjoy and engage with. This means that when we encounter art we like, it may have been specifically created for people like us.

In live theater, the audience’s response can change the performance itself. Actors may adjust timing or delivery when people laugh, remain silent, or become distracted.

Theatre must always be living in that dangerous moment of the unexpected; quite how is this audience going to respond? Is it indeed going to respond at all? Probably it won’t; we’ve had experiences where people have just fallen asleep. What do you do in that situation? You’ve got to go through those two hours; how do you wake this person up?

—Jatinder Verma

Audiences vary greatly in size and diversity. They can be one person or thousands of people; they can encompass one culture or many. Furthermore, audience engagement with art falls along a spectrum from a solo experience to a shared experience, wherein the audience participates in the art together. Audience members bring different experiences to a work, and a person’s response can change over time. It often happens that you read a book as a child and have vivid memories of the story and the tears running down your face. However, when you return to the same work as an adult, you read the same words and realize they have no impact on you anymore. You’re a different person as an adult than you were as a child. As Heraclitus is credited with saying, “You could not step twice into the same river.”

I reflected that public art looks futile without its power source: a crowd.

—Peter Schjeldahl

Engaging in art is a work of collaboration with the artist and, sometimes, even the audience. Reactions can be contagious. We participate in some forms of art as part of a group, and at least some of our reaction to these types of experiences is influenced by the group’s responses: When one person starts to clap, we do the same. When someone starts to laugh, so do we.

The collective experience of theater and music has long served a purpose beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. These art forms have traditionally been performed for groups, to provide a platform for broader social, cultural, and political commentary. Philip Ball, in The Music Instinct, explains, “Music commonly happens in places and contexts in which it creates social cohesion, for example in religions and ritual or in dance and communal singing.”

Audiences both shape and are shaped by the art they consume; “we transform what we look at.” The feedback of the audience—their responses, their buying habits, and so on—impacts how artists work. This feedback can influence future work. In turn, a work can change how people see a subject or what they seek out next.

Music is not a series of acoustic facts. [It] emerges from a collaboration in which the listener too plays an active part.

—Philip Ball

Some artists extensively study their audience to cater every detail of their work to them. Taken too far, this consideration can change the artist as they pander to the whims of the crowd. Other artists are less concerned with the public’s reception and choose to create what they wish and hope it finds an audience. The prolific writer John Updike once claimed that when he wrote his books, he liked to imagine them being found—old and battered, with their dust jackets missing—on a library shelf by a teenage boy somewhere east of Kansas. To him, the reviews and the book shops were secondary to that very particular audience member he envisioned.

Two useful ways to describe audiences are by who they are (demographics) and by what they like (preferences). Audience demographics include factors like age, gender, socioeconomic status, occupation, location, and so on. Audience preferences cover whatever it is people enjoy in a work of art. So, an artist might target their work at people over age thirty with corporate jobs, or they may target people who enjoy fast-paced romantic fiction.

Artists frequently ask themselves, Who will pay for my creation? Thus, a consideration for some artists is creating art that will sell. In nineteenth-century Europe, there was a type of theater piece called the “well-made play.” The best of the genre were well written and carefully plotted, but they were designed first and foremost to be entertaining. The plots were logical and the resolutions satisfying. Although they were sometimes attacked for being simplistic and saccharine, Neil Grant says, in History of Theatre, “Not all the practitioners of the ‘well-made play’ were artistically or socially worthless and, even if they did set their sights firmly on filling seats—and tills—they were hardly the first, or last, writers whose ambition was to give the audience what it liked.” One can view this notion of meeting demand as practical. Without an audience—and its associated money—to sustain an artist, it can become economically prohibitive to make art.

Throughout the centuries, art has been consumed by vastly different audiences. Sometimes it has been more like a public good shared freely among a group of people. Often, however, artists were looking for payment of some sort, and the art itself would be heavily influenced by who was doing the paying. The way you captivate someone on the street versus in a theater is different. Materials, such as paint, could be very expensive, and so the portrait of a wealthy patron might be imaginatively flattering versus technically realistic. And for centuries, artists created without the benefit of copyright protection, so being clearly and widely associated with a work was paramount.

Creating for someone influences what you create. Performing to someone can make us better, since knowing that we are being watched can help us focus.

Once you start looking for audiences, you start to see them everywhere. Another useful distinction is between reaching people directly and reaching them through intermediaries. A performer may interact with a crowd in person; a writer may depend on an editor, publisher, or platform to reach readers. These intermediaries and the conventions they use can amplify a message, reshape it, or prevent it from reaching the intended audience.

The well-meaning mother is constantly frustrated by the inability of her child to answer questions like “What did you do today?” (to which the answer is usually a muttered “Nothing”—a cover for “I don’t know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose story shape on the events”). To tell stories, you have to hear stories, and you have to have an audience to hear the stories you can tell.

—Sara Maitland