I've been reading the ArtsJournal series "Engaging Art" since last week. What a great conversation about how things happen between art and audiences. A few brief excerpts below, plus great reading on the blog, mp3s, and a future book, so dig in!

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As any good marketer knows, word-of-mouth is your best friend. Technology has only made word-of-mouth even more important, as people can communicate instantly and to many, many people at the same time.

What does this mean for orchestras? First of all, we rarely present programs that run long enough to even begin to leverage word-of-mouth as a tool to make a choice. Museums, on the other hand, have had major success in mounting exhibitions which have long runs, creating the opportunity to leverage audiences and their voices. Imagine for a moment what might happen if a major American orchestra took a risk and scheduled the same concert for six months, or repeated a program five times in a year...

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So -- Mozart's time. The first thing we'd find surprising (to put it mildly) would be the behavior of the audience. They wouldn't be quiet. They'd talk while the music was playing, and applaud the moment they heard something they liked, right in the middle of the performance... What it adds up to is a much more populist, much less canonic, much less "artistic," much more populist musical world than we have now, at least in classical music. It was noisier, more audience-based. Much more, in fact, like the pop world is today.

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Perhaps it's true that classical music is just one niche among many now. It will attract its segment of the population, just as there is a thriving subculture right now called steampunk. The people who choose this style, aesthetic, and guiding lifestyle theme (one choice out of so many!) are buoyed by interest in all types of gadgetry steam-powered, made of brass. Think oily Victorian leather waistcoats, goggles, and jaunty, hand-built machines that chug along on steam. On the surface, steampunk seems anachronistic, oddball, "totally random" (...why this choice out of so many?). But when you talk to people who consider themselves steampunk and observe them, they don't just "like steampunk." They dress up in it. They invent gadgets and build them themselves. They write and illustrate manuscripts of science-fiction set in an alternate 19th century universe. Many of their friends met through steampunk activities--or rather, they and the people whose company they happened to enjoy in the first place found others and created this subculture from scratch. And so you can start to read expressions of identity from the ways that these people create and access media, art, and social situations. They value intellectual curiosity, an engineer's hands-on capability, a quirky difference from the mainstream-- born of a realization that their way of life is teetering on the edge of complete technological obsolescence.