The orchestra’s new business plan, “Creating a 21st Century Orchestra,” is being positoned as a radical step toward relevance and away from the pieties of the past. But compared to some of what’s going on in the arts these days, it doesn’t push very far. Where are the consumers in this new model? Largely in their seats, where they belong.

Reading the plan, I was reminded of what a friend said after returning from the League of American Orchestras conference a year or two ago. “It’s a dinosaur convention,” he reported. “They all know the comet has struck, but they have no clue what to do about it.”

In the Colorado document, there’s much talk of new realities and the need for “redirection.” “The program content and existing format of the orchestra is no longer appropriate to adapt to a viable 21 century model,” the plan declares. But that big diagnosis is followed by a small, familiar prescription: the orchestra will “expand its performances through full orchestra, chamber orchestra, and small ensembles to venues around the entire area.” 

The logic, presumably, is that what’s no longer relevant Coloradans when presented in Boettcher Hall will be relevant when presented in venues in their own communities. That makes a little sense, but only a little. Venues make a difference when they create alternative frames for the arts experience: new conventions, behaviors, participation, interaction, vibe. (Arts researcher Alan Brown has a terrific forthcoming paper about the role of venues, which I'll link to.)

Jeffrey Kahane leads the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Photo Karl Gehring, The Denver Post

There’s no mention of any of that in the Colorado plan. Instead, it reaffirms the traditional, presentational model of classical music (“uncompromising artistic quality presenting music that is timeless and fostering new music”) as well as a taste-making function that sounds painfully self-justifying in this context (“our artistic responsibility to be a curator of the great music, traditional and contemporary, as a service to our community”). Nobody seems to have noticed that values like those are what led orchestras to the relevance and support challenges they currently face, and which the new plan is supposed to address.

In other words, everything’s being questioned except the underlying assumptions. 

I guess that’s a formula for incremental change, at least, and for the institutional stability that makes change possible. But it may also make institutions themselves—established, sizable, and reasonably well-funded arts organizations like the Colorado Symphony—vulnerable to competition from upstarts offering consumers more dramatic departures from tradition and more involving forms of relevance.  

I’ve blogged about some of those upstarts before, and in my next post I’ll look at a few more who are getting consumers out of their seats and into the business (and artistic) model.

Artists are allowed to make a museum experience anything they want, and many of them are giving visitors an active role. Which leaves me wondering why curators don’t grant themselves the same license to play with visitors and art, and what’s going to happen to the traditional kind of installation, in which audiences are supposed to just…look.

The art museum world is still buzzing about Robin Pogrebin’s piece in the Times criticizing “populist” exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, about which I hope to have a guest post later this week.

But the article that caught my eye this weekend was a review of the Rivane Neuenschwander retrospective at the New Museum. I haven’t seen the show, but from the review it sounds like the works could be divided into two categories: one in which visitors are asked to look (and maybe think, feel, chuckle, frown, whatever), and one in which they’re asked to do something — to become part of the artwork and complete it, or at least further it, by their actions.

At the Neuenschwander show, that can mean sitting down with a police sketch artist to try to recreate the face of your first love, or writing a wish on a slip of paper and exchanging it with someone else’s wish printed on a ribbon and hanging on a wall (photo).

Of course, Neuenschwander is hardly the first artist to give the audience these kinds of roles (although it’s fun to realize that her German last name means someone who farms or occupies newly cleared land). The recently-concluded Marina Abramović exhibition at MoMA, which got such attention in part because of the nudity in some of the works, included a performance in which visitors waited in line, sometimes for hours, for a chance to sit in a chair across from Abramović (who was clothed, by the way, in white robes) and gaze at, and be gazed at by, the artist. For a glimpse of how intense this experience was for many participants, check out the remarkable website Marina Abramović Made Me Cry. (Photo left. The site, a reposting from MoMA's Flickr page, is itself a demonstration of how social and interactive the whole experience was.)

And the Indianapolis Museum of Art just opened the 100-acre Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park in which the eight commissioned installations that inaugurate the park all sound (according to yet another NY Times piece) either casually or profoundly participatory (photos below).

We’re dealing with a deep distinction here. The works that I’m calling participatory require an audience in a different way than traditional “behold me” art does. They’re simply incomplete without the visitor. Think of an empty chair across from Marina Abramović, or Neuenschwander’s array of wish-imprinted ribbons hanging on a wall to be looked at and read. ...

Starbucks is “eschewing its cookie-cutter ways” and letting variation and independence bloom. If they can do it, how about museums and symphonies?

You may have heard that Starbucks, a brand almost synonymous with product consistency, has begun opening coffee shops that look and feel like independent, neighborhood coffeehouses. No Starbucks logo, and barely the Starbucks name. Instead, they’re called things like 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, just like the local options. They buy small-batch beans and brew carefully to order, like the artisanal coffeehouses do. The design of each location is a one-off rather than a knock-off, expressive of the local scene.

Sure, this is an attempt to co-opt the entrepreneurial and anti-corporate energies that have fueled (along with all that caffeine) the resurgence of the local coffeehouse in the last decade or two. As a consumer I’m not sure I like the idea, and clearly I’m not alone.

But as a consultant who studies how people make choices that confirm their sense of themselves, their desired identity (like museum visiting and concertgoing) – well, I have to admire the insight of the Starbucks folks into a certain kind of twenty-first century mindset.

An Onion headline caught my eye because it jokes about something close to home: the self-interest at the heart of many institutions’ audience research efforts.

I do empathize with the joke at the core of the article, from back in September, “University Of Illinois Researchers Find Link Between Attending University Of Illinois, Receiving Solid Education At Great Price.” Isn’t that the dream that everyone has for the audience research projects they fund or lead? How could an organization go into audience research not hoping that it emerges with a report validating its worth and proving its indispensability in stark black and white (or better yet, colorful graphs and charts)? 

(On a related note, check out a post that my colleague Cheryl wrote on advocacy vs. empiricism. She could have used the same Onion headline.)

For the people within institutions who are responsible for research, hesitation and nervous anticipation about what the study will uncover are natural. What if the report highlights the areas in which we’re most vulnerable as an organization? Areas where we fall short? Or initiatives that have cost a lot of money but haven’t yet had a measurable impact on my audience or mission? Am I supposed to feel proud to share findings like those? How will I get funders and board members to trust my decisions and open up their wallets to me after research findings like that?