Creative Sparks
By LYNDALL CRISP
Australian Financial Review
1 July 2004
Ann Daly calls it the “Martha Stewart syndrome.” She says of the American homewares queen: “She showed us that people want to learn how to be more creative in their everyday lives.
“They want to see that they don’t have to be a professional artist to have something of the creative spark in their lives.
“Martha showed people, inspired people and gave them confidence that they did have the abilities. That’s something the arts also do, by exposing people to art and artists — not just the product of the art but the process of the arts.”
Here as a guest of the Australia Council, Daly — associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, arts educator, consultant, critic and journalist — is holding a series of workshops for dance companies. She is to give the keynote address at the Dance Rebooted conference in Melbourne today.
“People want to not just buy a product or buy a service, they want to experience it,” she says. “It’s the principle of Starbucks, a third space between home and work, a comfortable space, an experience.”
Performing arts companies should be engaging audiences with similar experiences, Daly says. In the US, participation in the arts has remained fairly static, but museum attendances have risen because they’ve built meaningful relationships with visitors. Instead of a curatorial approach, telling people what they should see, they’ve asked what would be meaningful for their constituents. More convenient hours, singles’ nights and jazz performances have been the result.
“Everything follows from that shift of consciousness about who the audience is,” Daly says.
At a workshop in Sydney this week, Daly asked the class: if you won the lottery and you never had to sell another ticket, would you still invite an audience? The unanimous answer was yes.
“Everyone said that an artwork is not complete without a spectator, which is a very different take than 40 years ago, when aesthetically you didn’t need to have a spectator to complete the work. It may have been more conceptual and didn’t need a participant.
“Performers need the energy. Their performance is dependent on that feedback of energy that they breathe off.
“It’s crucial. It’s not just about money. The audience is important because it’s part of the interaction. Art improves as the audience develops.”
Daly says arts companies occasionally think their only choice is between two undesirable things — for example, between the integrity of the artist and the satisfaction of the audience member.
“I reject all no-win dichotomies,” she says. “We have to reframe these oppositions in a way that both the artist can maintain integrity and the audience member can have a meaningful experience.
“Sometimes we forget that the arts world is not the whole world and we have only more to gain by opening up our lens to consider how people relate to the arts who are not already involved.”
Since the dotcom crash, company endowments to the arts have dropped by one-third in the US, Daly says, and artists have had to become more entrepreneurial as competition for government grants increases.
“Young people are savvy. In a sense they are the new economy. They’re becoming entrepreneurs. It used to be a dirty word. I always like to think, what better definition is there for someone who starts a dance company? That’s someone who says they don’t want to be just a member of the corps. They want to create their own work and do it themselves.
“They’re visionary, risk-taking, out-of-the-box, seat-of-your-pants entrepreneurs.”
Whichever party wins the US presidential election in November, Daly says, it probably won’t translate into more resources for the arts.
“The Democratic Party’s platform embraces the arts more than the Republican platform, but the problems that artists have go beyond particular parties,” she says.
“No matter what part is in power, the economy is still the economy, grant money is still in short supply and the world is still more interested in movies and television.”