Change product instead of public by Gunduz Kalic

Dumb - or dumber? The rub is that the arts - the performing arts especially - are desperate for new audiences, especially outside of Sydney and Melbourne.

For a range of reasons, as the Nugent Inquiry's Securing the Future reports of 1999 show, traditional arts audiences have become less dependable - and even gone into decline.

As Dr.Helen Nugent and her colleagues recommended, the federal government has tipped in $43 million of extra money to keep at least the Major Performing Arts sub-sector afloat for another few years.

One of the provisos seems to have been that the (subsidised) arts do something about making themselves more attractive to ordinary Australians, who, by and large, don't attend performing arts events much.

Enter, stage right, Saatchi and Saatchi, commissioned by the Australia Council to study how Australians see and value the arts - the better to strategize how to persuade them to value the arts more in the future than they do now.

With its report Australians and the Arts, released last week, Saatchi and Saatchi holds up a most instructive mirror to the Australian arts sector - but one, regrettably, that doesn't expose to the gazer's view a most unfortunate blemish.

Notwithstanding that Paul Costantoura, Saatchi strategic planner and author of Australians and the Arts, warns in his introduction that some readers may find some of his "observations and recommendations confronting", the report is actually quite careful not to offend the constituency of the Australia Council, the arts sector, around the issue of elitism. Too careful.

The accent of Costantoura's report is upon changing widespread perceptions held even by many of those enjoying higher incomes that the arts - and current arts audiences - are elitist and thus are off-putting.

Beyond venue ambiences and the silvertail, "perceived social environment of the arts", it alludes only once to the possibility that it is "creative output" itself - arts product - that needs to be changed in order for the arts to win more broad acceptance.

In which case, merely attempting to change public perceptions by generic ad campaigns or network marketing on the proposed theme of "Welcome to the Australian Arts" simply will not work.

One of Costantoura's more intriguing findings is that the majority of Australians would like to see accepted as art in the future "shows or bands at the local pub or licensed club [and] performers like Kylie Minogue".

This is a populist conception of art at odds with the more limited current definition based upon notions of artistic excellence and the traditional arts, which, he writes, appears to be sourced "in the arts sector itself".

However, Costantoura tiptoes around this important contradiction, assuring the arts sector that it does not need to "dumb down" its work in order for it to come to be more valued by more Australians. Rather, the way ahead is for Australians, in schools, by the arts sector and through the media, to be taught to better appreaciate and enjoy the arts - with somewhat different packaging and broader definitions of what constitutes art.

This view, which we might call the aesthetic education approach, has much currency in the traditional performing arts. Unfortunately, it is seriously flawed.

Saatchi and Saatchi as a media agency ought to know better. In elementary marketing terms, such an approach follows the discredited "product concept": make whatever product you like and sell like hell.

If there is a problem, find a better way to sell. The marketing concept, of course, proposes building a better mousetrap, one the customer wants because it does the job.

Here we are at the nub of the dumb or dumber popular culture nightmare that haunts many in the arts. Do I think we should pin the label "art" on Kylie Minogue and forget all about the subsidised performing arts houses and their traditions? No, my hunch is that we need to try to reconstitute theatre and other live performing arts forms as places where representative cross-sections of the populations as a whole can "commune" together, as playwright Arthur Miller put it.

Though Costantoura regrettably lets the arts continue to hoist itself, he is very right to emphasise that contrary to what many in the arts sector think, the problem is not that Australians are "dumb or dumber" about aesthetics. Rather, "it's the shows, stupid".

In order to make itself more accessible the arts will have to take risks with content and performance styles, risk dropping the cloak of excellence. Perhaps courage can be taken from Shakespeare, whose enduring success as a playwright is due to the fact that his plays were written and played for "all the people" and not just for some of them.

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, July 3, 2000.