Greater focus on audiences and the idea that Norway’s efforts in the field of cultural policy have not achieved the goal of reaching a wide audience now enjoy widespread support among those involved in cultural policy in Norway. Minister of Culture Anniken Huitfeldt is personally involved, she has been on a study trip to London and she secured funding for the continued existence of the newly established member organisation Audiences Norway in the last national budget. In connection with her trip to London, she commented to the daily newspaper Aftenposten on 8 February 2010 that the increase in public spending on culture in recent years is not reflected in a corresponding focus on audiences, especially in relation to new audience groups. She emphasised youth, ‘minority groups’, people with disabilities and people on low incomes in particular. But this rhetoric also has support at the other end of the political scale. Ib Thomsen, member of the Storting’s Standing Committee on Family and Cultural Affairs for the Progress Party, argued in favour of audience development in the Storting’s debate on the committee’s recommendation for the museums of the future on 2 March 2010. He emphasised the importance of audience development, arguing that it will lead to ‘increased understanding and inquisitiveness about the arts among people without prior knowledge of the sector’. In other words, implicit support for the democratisation of a culture that does not necessarily fill its own capacity, generate a profit or reach a sufficiently diverse audience. 

Everyone who is engaged in mediating publicly-funded cultural activities knows that this is nothing new. Ever since the Storting and the government, in the period after World War II, expressed a desire to make culture that had previously been reserved for the few available to ‘everyone’ – what students of cultural policy call the democratisation of culture – the wish to reach as many as possible and to reach beyond social and geographical dividing lines has been a priority. To be more precise, this has been the definitive goal of cultural policy. The political goal of reaching out is manifested in the activities of everyone in Norway who works every day to disseminate or market publicly-funded culture. I would like to stress that my concern here is publicly-funded culture. The opposite of publicly-funded culture is the private, profit-maximising culture industry, which is concerned with precisely the same, but with the focus on marketing products that can generate a profit. Only customer segments with a market potential are of interest, and products (i.e. artistic works) that do not contribute to this potential are not given priority. As far as I know, producers and decision-makers in this part of the arts and culture sector are not concerned with audience development. Their challenges are in many ways less complicated. My primary focus in this article will therefore be on publicly-funded culture.

Audience development is based on a desire to democratise the part of the cultural sector that cannot survive in a private market and that the authorities intervene in and fund. This is nothing new, and nor is it typically Norwegian. Most countries in Europe have had audience development (insofar as there is consensus on what the concept entails) as an important cultural policy goal for almost 60 years. The extent to which this is followed up in practice is another matter, and criticism similar to that made by Anniken Huitfeldt has been voiced in many countries.

To be able to arrive at good audience development strategies, and to debate this issue, we need an understanding of what audience development actually is. I do not believe there is consensus on this issue in the Norwegian arts and culture sector and this is not unique to Norway either.

Audience development in a cultural policy perspective

The quest for the origins of audience development cannot be separated from the idea of democratising culture, i.e. making cultural activities available to as many people as possible, across geographical and social dividing lines. In the UK, the term access is used. It refers to the principle of making arts institutions more accessible to both large audience groups in general and to special groups, such as young people or people from non-British backgrounds. It is important to note that the discourse on cultural policy has not suggested that these barriers to increased audience figures should be addressed by changing the artistic programme. There are nonetheless many examples of organisations implementing artistic or programme-related changes in order to remove barriers or to reach larger audience groups. The inclusion of cabarets and musicals on the repertoire of institutional theatres and Christmas concerts or Mozart by candlelight are examples of this, but this has seldom been an explicit part of cultural policy. And Huitfeldt clearly states that audience development must not be at the expense of ‘the serious arts’ and that funding will not be switched to projects with wider appeal (this is also from Aftenposten’s article).

The clearest change in Norwegian practice since the 1990s that can be related to audience development is the arts institutions’ increasing emphasis on marketing, a function that has gradually been introduced by most arts institutions, or at least the biggest ones. Of course, part of their job has been to contribute to (and in some cases increase) the proportion of self-generated revenues, i.e. make money, but in most cases, the marketing function is in line with a policy whose explicit aim is to democratise an already existing cultural activity. There has been particular focus recently on attracting audiences from the children and youth segments as well as people from non-Norwegian cultural backgrounds (typically second or third generation immigrants). 

It is important to stress that the principle of democratising culture has always been based on a specific and narrow definition of culture. In the context of cultural policy, culture is understood as something that is curated, programmed and selected by experts such as artistic directors, curators, artistic programmers, bureaucrats and politicians who have the ability to exercise cultural leadership on behalf of the rest of the population – or, more appropriately in this context, on behalf of the audience. In Norway as well as in most other European countries, it has in practice been implicit that it is a special culture that is to be democratised. In the rhetoric of Norwegian cultural policy, this is often referred to as professional art, i.e. art that is not defined as what it is, but instead entails an implicit understanding of what it does not include, namely art produced in an amateur context (i.e. not by professionally trained artists) or in an industrial context (by the profit-maximising culture industry). Among politicians in the arts field, bureaucrats, academics and the publicly-funded arts sector this is seen, with a few exceptions, as natural and unproblematic. As such, audience development is not based on an understanding that the population does not have access to culture in general, but to a specific culture: professional art. The goal of audience development is usually to reach and get more people engaged in that part of culture.

So, even if audience development as a concept has a certain novelty value, it represents a goal that is in accordance with a central principle (many would perhaps say the central principle) of Norwegian cultural policy, namely the democratisation of professional art.

The target groups for audience development

We have established that audience development is an integral part of Norwegian cultural policy and has been so for a long time. But what audience groups does the policy want to reach? In the early 2000s, I was sales manager at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK. I had barely started before the marketing director told me that the theatre’s audience development work had produced very good results. That year, they had started putting on family productions in the Christmas period, and the result was a massive increase in sales in the ‘families with children’ segment in the prosperous suburbs around Birmingham (in other surveys, they had found that these were white families with a higher education, a family income of NOK 700,000 or more, and with Volvo or Range Rover as their car of choice). My immediate reaction was that this was not audience development, it was simply the core audience without a babysitter! My own perception of audience development was that it was about reaching beyond the ordinary audience, focusing on the groups Huitfeldt refers to, for instance youth, people from non-Norwegian (or British) backgrounds, and people with little education and low income. That was ten years ago, but I still believe there is an element of confusion as to what is actually meant by audience development. Many people see it as just a more politically correct term for marketing culture.

As everyone knows, marketing originated in the commercial sector and its principles are to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs. This is based on the principle that only the products that can contribute to profits have a right to exist and that one product cannot satisfy everyone, but that all target groups must have their needs met by different products. The cultural policy researcher Nobuko Kawashima attempts to address this issue by relating cultural marketing to audience development. She argues that there are four different types of audience development: audience education, taste cultivation, extended marketing and cultural inclusion. The first three all use established marketing techniques to increase the visitor frequency of an existing audience or to reach a larger audience not unlike the audience one already has, i.e. a sales increase in an existing segment or related segments. The strategies employed vary. For audience education, it is often about offering additional services that provide increased insight into and demystify the artwork offered. This can be everything from events such as meetings with performers to catalogues, web material and videos. Taste cultivation seeks to market other art forms or genres to an existing audience – a typical example from the theatre sector is to try to promote new drama to an audience steeped in a classical repertoire. Finally, extended marketing denotes the application of a number of marketing measures targeting a similar audience to the existing one, which, in most cases, means a potential audience of middle class people with higher education and a relatively high income. Most people involved in cultural marketing will be able to identify with this description. Marketing budgets are limited, and the people in charge of marketing have to make strategic choices, which means it is self-evident that it makes business sense to start with the audience groups closest to hand, i.e. to either entice the core audience to come more often and try new things, or to reach out to a potential audience where the barriers to participation are relatively low. If such strategies are what we mean by audience development, then there is little to distinguish it from cultural marketing. It is the fourth dimension, cultural inclusion, that presents the big challenges.

This is also the dimension Huitfeldt refers to. She believes that the increase in the spending on culture has not benefitted the groups Kawashima refers to as being culturally excluded. She is not referring to marketing, but to a type of audience development that focuses on audience groups that are hard and challenging to reach – the groups that profit-maximising marketing would ignore, but that the publicly-funded culture sector is tasked with trying to come into contact with. That is their job. The problem is that the success stories are few and far between and that the audience groups that were excluded twenty to thirty years ago are still excluded, for the most part. Thus, Huitfeldt’s observation is correct.

Giving up is not an option, however. Audience development, understood as reaching new audience groups with demographic characteristics that are far removed from the core audience, and that the rest of this article will be concerned with, is often (again, according to Kawashima) based on the following assumptions:

• Professional art should and can be made accessible to absolutely everyone.
• What we need to do is to remove physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers.
• Access to art can help to combat social exclusion.[1]

This is not the first time a politician in the arts field has observed and reflected on arts institutions’ limited success in fulfilling the first assumption that professional art should reach as large and diverse an audience as possible. In their book on Norwegian cultural policy (To knurrende løver (‘Two growling lions’), Hans Fredrik Dahl and Tore Helseth argue that we have experienced at least two instances of what they call ‘cultural panic’ since 1945. The first occurred in the mid-1960s, when politicians and others were very anxious about the increasing influence of the international culture industry. This led to the establishment of the Arts Council Norway, which was partly financed through a tax on weekly magazines. The second instance was in the early 1970s, when it became clear that the big allocations to the arts had not had the expected effect in the form of bigger audiences;[2] this is very similar to the concern expressed by Huitfeldt today. In the 1970s, however, the response was not audience development. Instead, attention was redirected from professional art and partly replaced by an increased focus on cultural democracy, where culture was given a much broader definition and where the cultural policy decisions were not to be made by curators, programmers and other art experts alone, but by the people themselves or their representatives. The idea of cultural democracy has now gone completely out of fashion, however, and the concept is no longer current in the cultural policy discourse.

Back to Kawashima’s assumptions. Do the culture sector and politicians like Huitfeldt share the belief that professional art can reach everyone, that there are only physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers that must be torn down and, finally, that access to art can combat social exclusion? Of course, it is difficult to see the legitimacy of a cultural policy that largely benefits one section of the population alone, and there are few examples of a public good as redistributed as the arts. Everyone pays through tax, but the benefits are unevenly distributed for the benefit of those who already have the highest cultural and economic capital. It is natural, therefore, that players in the art sector embrace audience development – anything else would be impossible.

But it goes deeper than that: the belief in the magical powers and civilising effect of art is part of a discursive practice that manifests itself in the arts sector in two ways. Firstly, in the belief in the goodness of art and the importance of everyone sharing in it. This is repeated again and again in cultural political documents such as white papers on the arts and culture, and in speeches in the Storting, in speeches given by and interviews with artists, artistic directors and politicians in the arts field. However, no one can explain exactly how an individual’s meeting with professional art can have a positive influence. In my own doctoral work, in which I looked at the rationale behind Norway’s cultural policy, I reviewed all white papers on the arts and culture since 1973, how they were received by the Storting, white papers on the ‘Cultural Rucksack’ and interviews with several politicians in the arts field, artists and directors of art institutions. It was striking to see how strongly the belief in the ability of art to facilitate personal growth (what I call Bildung, from the German Weimar tradition) is internalised in the cultural policy discourse. Allegedly, professional art can help people, especially children and young people, to achieve self-recognition and can increase their self-awareness and understanding of their surroundings, which in turn will enrich their lives and make them capable of utilising their own potential and so on. This is expressed as a self-evident truth that does not need to be further underpinned and that certainly does not need to be supported by research. A good example of how such an understanding of the influence of art on the individual and society is internalised in what I call a bildung discourse, is Yngve Slettholm, former State Secretary in the Ministry of Culture. At the opening of a national conference about the Cultural Rucksack in 2004, after making some sporadic references to how art, presented as part of the rucksack, could help pupils in their learning and acquisition of knowledge, and that it could have a positive effect on the creative economy, Slettholm proclaimed that ‘To those of us who are familiar with the value of art and culture, it is of course unnecessary to refer to research.’ This is an understanding shared by so many people that I would maintain it represents a hegemonic discourse in the Norwegian arts sector. However, as I have already mentioned, few people are able to articulate exactly how this growth and ability to achieve self-awareness arise. Instead, there is a discursive practice that is not based on what is said, but on what is left unspoken, because it is so obvious that no further explanation is needed, and this is the second way in which the belief in the magical and civilising power of art manifests itself discursively: through what is so self-evident that it does not have to be said. This discourse also rests on a shared understanding that popular culture – which has the biggest audience[3] – does not have the same bildung potential as ‘professional’ art. Norway’s cultural policy thus has a strong civilising aspect that is based on this understanding that art possesses a unique potential for personal growth and education in the broadest sense.

This belief that art can be made accessible to all, if only the physical, geographical, financial and psychological barriers are removed, is problematic, however. It conflicts with the paradigmatic conclusion of so much sociological research since Pierre Bourdieu presented his study of cultural practices in France in the 1960s in his influential book La Distinction. Although Bourdieu’s findings and conclusions have been much criticised, his idea that the ability to appreciate art and become an active consumer of ‘professional’ art presupposes knowledge that can help to decipher the artistic message still stands. Such knowledge is most often acquired through informal socialisation in the family, in childhood/adolescence and through meeting other people who already have these qualities, for instance in connection with work or education. This is often contingent on class or cultural background. People who have not had role models who appreciated art and culture have little ability to appreciate art and will generally either be negative or indifferent to publicly-funded culture (professional art).

Kawashima goes one step further and maintains, with reference to Bourdieu, that the arts have an excluding and distinguishing function that divides the different social classes. In other words, it is a project that is the direct opposite of a cultural policy aimed at democratising culture. It is clear, therefore, that the development of new audience groups that lack the necessary habitus to appreciate professional art is a big and difficult project.

The limitations of audience development

According to the Norwegian media barometer, Norway’s cultural consumption is increasing steadily and access to digitally distributed culture means that the potential diversity is greater than ever before: just think of Spotify or iTunes. Nevertheless, Norway’s cultural policy is based on living arts that include visual art, new and live music, theatre, opera, dance, various festivals etc. that cannot survive without public funding. This funding must have the broadest possible support among the population as a whole on order to legitimise the use of tax money for this purpose. In addition, as explained above, there is a strong belief in the positive influence of art on both the individual and society as a whole. It is against this backdrop and on these assumptions that the need for audience development arises.

If audience development refers to a desire to reach new audience groups that are demographically different from the existing audience or that are culturally or socially excluded, this is, as already mentioned, a major challenge. Anniken Huitfeldt mentioned ‘minority groups’ (a better term would perhaps be ‘people from non-Norwegian cultural backgrounds’) as an audience group that has not benefited from the increased funding for culture in recent years and that should be developed. In this context, it is appropriate to ask what sort of cultural activities this audience wants and is interested in. The government’s white paper on ‘The Year of Cultural Diversity 2008’ mentions two potentially conflicting cultural policy challenges: the challenge of how, on the one hand, a ‘majority society can help groups and individuals from minorities to participate in and further develop their own cultural activities’ (my emphasis), versus ‘how can the established culture sector reflect the multicultural society to a greater extent’, on the other. In connection with the latter challenge, there is also the issue of the extent to which it is expedient to integrate minorities in ‘the majority society’s established systems and institutions.’ This is a key cultural policy issue, not just for ‘minority groups’ from non-Norwegian backgrounds, but also for large audience groups who do not currently take advantage of the culture already on offer. Should they all be included and involved in the established systems and established institutions or should the focus be on their cultural needs instead? The idea of cultural democracy that prevailed in the cultural policy rhetoric of the 1970s was based on people being given an opportunity to participate in and develop their own cultural activities. Instead, audience development is about integrating large groups (including groups with demographic characteristics that are different from the core audience) in established systems and institutions. In practice, this would mean (see Kawashima’s assumption presented above) that the two largest groups from non-European backgrounds in Oslo, i.e. people from Pakistan and Somalia, can and should take advantage of the culture offered by the capital’s arts institutions, such as the National Theatre, the National Museum, the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. This is an enormous task. To be fair, it would also have been an enormous task if the target group had been the white working class in Oslo and Akershus. It does not make business sense to spend an already limited marketing budget on developing these target groups. But, as already mentioned, this is not about traditional marketing, but about audience development for the purpose of cultural inclusion.

I have already referred to Kawashima and do so again. She distinguishes between two types of audience development: target-led and product-led.[4] Kawashima claims that most of the British audience development up until that point (her paper was published in 2000) was product-led. This means that those who wanted to develop a new audience wanted to establish contact between new audience groups and an existing art product. This practice is part of the cultural policy goal of democratising culture. Kawashima is sceptical, however, of whether this is possible if the goal is to facilitate cultural inclusion (i.e. to reach groups whose demographic characteristics are significantly different from those of the core audience). I believe there are few examples of arts organisations that have had any great success with this kind of product-led audience development strategy.[5]

Instead, Kawashima argues that an audience development strategy that endeavours to achieve cultural inclusion must be target-led in order to come into contact with a new audience on their own terms. One example of this practice is the Norwegian film production company Motlys, which is holding a test screening of its latest film Jeg reiser alene (I travel alone) at which the participants are interviewed afterwards and can thereby influence the final editing of the film. This is common practice in Hollywood, where, for example, different endings to a film are tested on a panel of audience members. The goal here, of course, is not to engage in charitable audience development, but to maximise the film’s earning potential. The British dance company Motionhouse has tried something similar by allowing a younger audience to be present during rehearsals of new dance productions to make them as interesting as possible for this target group. They want to reach a new audience group and have extensive experience of working with marginalised groups such as prison inmates, who naturally are also given a chance to participate in their artistic work through workshops, movement therapy etc. This can be a (perhaps relatively modest) form of target-led audience development. If the goal is to reach audience groups that are really far removed from the core audience (for example, if the National Theatre wanted to develop first-time Somali immigrants), it would probably be necessary to go much further.

This is a completely different way of working that many artists have extensive experience of (art therapy, for example, is an established practice, the Cultural Rucksack has probably also contributed, and Norwegian artists and art mediators have had to acknowledge that they operate in a cultural policy climate in which a big proportion of the arts budget is aimed at children and young people, and that they have to produce art for this target group). However, I believe the arts institutions (especially those that are allocated most funds through the Ministry of Culture’s budget) have far less experience of and are perhaps less open to this kind of practice. The success stories are also few and far between in the big arts institutions in the UK. This type of target-led audience development relies to some extent on the cultural democracy of the 1970s, in which audience groups were allowed to influence what was offered more than curators, artistic directors and other decision-makers in the culture sector. This represents another type of cultural leadership, one that is less predicated on an arts sector driven by artistic goals, and more on a desire to combat social and cultural exclusion. The question, of course, is: are the arts institutions prepared for this?

Conclusion

I began this article by claiming that, even though the concept is relatively new, audience development has always (at least in a modern cultural policy context going back to 1945) enjoyed wide support in the Norwegian arts sector. Nevertheless, it is not clear what this concept entails. I have tried to distinguish between the two concepts of audience development and cultural marketing, and suggested that audience development that targets groups that we know to be susceptible to the art product we are offering, and that are demographically relatively similar to our existing audience, is not very different from traditional marketing. If, on the other hand, we, by audience development, mean a desire to achieve social and cultural inclusion, that is something different entirely. Marketing is after all a principle taken from the profit-maximising business sector, while a desire to include culturally excluded groups is a social goal.

The question that art mediators, art marketers and others who wish to prioritise audience development must ask themselves is whether what they want is a larger audience with a demographic profile that is similar to that of the core audience. If that is the case, then all the tools of marketing are at their disposal, such as pricing, the ambience of the art venue, promotion, the use of social media etc. However, if the goal is cultural inclusion, the situation is very different. The tools of marketing are of no use, the existing art product (which we all want to protect, which is so dear to us, and which is perhaps the original reason why we chose a career in the arts) is in the way, and the budgets seem infinitely small. If the goal is to combat social exclusion, the big question is what can be achieved through professional art. If the core product has to be set aside in favour of engaging new and culturally excluded audience groups on their own terms, this involves great challenges in relation to the arts organisations’ strategies and their approach to cultural leadership.

Egil Bjørnsen is a Senior Researcher at Agder Research. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, where he was also Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of the MA programme in European Cultural Policy and Management.

References:

Arnestad, Georg: ‘Kulturkrise?’, Dagbladet, 23 November 2000, http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2000/11/23/229391.html

Bourdieu, Pierre: Distinksjonen: en sosiologisk kritikk av dømmekraften (Oslo: Pax, 1995).

Dahl, Hans Fredrik and Helseth, Tore: To knurrende løver: Kulturpolitikkens historie 1814 - 2014 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2006).

Hurum, Eirin: ‘Finkulturen skal ut til folket?’, Aftenposten, 8 February 2010, http://eavis.aftenposten.no/aftenposten/67648/archive/demo/?page=30...

Kawashima, Nobuko: ‘Beyond the Division of Attenders vs Non-Attenders’ (Coventry: Centre for the Study of Cultural Policy, Working Paper 6, University of Warwick, 2000). http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/cp/publications/centre...

The Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs, 2006. Report No 17 to the Storting (2005-2006): ‘The Year of Cultural Diversity 2008’, Oslo.

Slettholm, Yngve, ’Kunst og kultur – mer enn pynten på kransekaka‟.’ Speech at the opening of the National conference on the Cultural Rucksack, 7 June 2004 http://www.regjeringen.no/se/dokumentarkiv/Regjeringen-Bondevik-II/...

Media use surveys:

The Norwegian media barometer: www.ssb.no/medie/

BI’s survey on culture consumption: http://www.bi.no/no/Om-BI/Nyheter-fra-BI/Nyheter-2009/Spotifysukses...

More information about the Motionhouse Dance Theatre: www.motionhouse.co.uk