Can I get raspberry sauce with that?
Big collaborations are the new art world blockbuster pattern talked about by the Guardian yesterday: egos coming together to offer audiences star vehicles that cross art form boundaries. Collaboration is a key 21st century skill, as the article proves.
But for me, the subtext of the article was more interesting: the convergence of art forms, and the impact that technologies have had on this. Concluding that the use of digital video, screens, music in many performances across many art forms has created a kind of cross-over or fusion, Guardian journalist Laura Barnett reports:
But the distinctions between genres have never felt quite so blurred as they do now. In theatre director Katie Mitchell’s words, the world is no longer “neat and organised and tidy”; it is fractured, multicultural, multimedia – and artists want to capture this. They know their audiences move easily between “high” and “low” culture, and that their attention shifts with the click of a mouse.
This is a great challenge to arts organisations still stuck within a strict genre definition, and still trying to define and communicate with their audience as “theatre lovers”, or “opera lovers”. As Mitchell suggests, audiences online will be eclectic, be used to choice, and know what they like, however its defined. They will not be particularly bothered about whether their culture is high or low, or even if it is defined as “theatre” or “opera”. This confirms my anxiety that those projects set-up to filter cultural event listings, and that do so by trying to digitally organise event listings by genre, may not be going down the right path.
It also confirms that the web presence (its smashed up content – the content that is everywhere else on the web but the official website) for an organisation is far more important than a destination website: audiences are just as likely to find out about a cultural event online via another interest they have – so its important that they can see the cultural event in that sphere of their interest.
