I write a weekly column for the website AudienceOutlookMonitor.com which collects audience surveys taken by arts groups from around the world and analyzes the results and tracks the data over time since this spring. Here are some columns over the last few months.

By FRANK RIZZO

After last week’s webinar on alternative and inventive spaces, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the arts field can redefine the relationship between audience and space and how we can gather together in meaningful ways during — and after — the pandemic.

So stories that I’ve recently run across touching on these subjects have resonated even more so. After the webinar, I’m seeing these initiatives in this rapid period of innovation as less “ad-hoc fanciful” and more “long-term purposeful.”

It may not any longer be about the building. Perhaps it never was.

But what about that structure that so many arts institutions call home?

I was drawn to an article from the American Alliance of Museums that posed the question: “What about museums’ physical presences themselves: their buildings? Will they be reimagined and reoriented to follow suit?”

Museum architects and engineers at two leading firms responded: “There are questions about whether attendance will continue to be an important metric driving museum growth, which has implications for space….Similarly, those cultural venues may have opportunities for outdoor temporary exhibitions, if their artworks and exhibits can be properly protected. These provisional modifications have other benefits, for example, by offering patrons a change of pace from the usual museum experience.”

Stepping away from the familiar turf can be an exciting experience for audiences, especially younger ones.

One can imagine this audience responding, as I did, to the haunting visuals of a site-specific venture at an old factory building in New York. As related in a story in The New York Times, “the D.J. Carl Craig’s basement ‘club’ shows the affinity between minimal art and techno music. It’s an after-party for the Covid age, minus the sweat.”

Compellingly marketed and presented….

|CONTINUED|