Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)

Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society.

The authors critically interrogate the challenges of access, diversity, privilege and responsibility in contemporary art. Asking who benefits from, pays for and consumes the arts, the book highlights fresh, forward-thinking audience and organisational attitudes that show the potential of live arts engagement to contribute to engaged citizenship. Complemented by comparative global analysis, the cutting-edge insights in this book are relevant for interdisciplinary researchers across audience studies and beyond.

Enhanced by a new framework for the understanding audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license here.

Stephanie E. Pitts is a professor of music education at the University of Sheffield. Her research and teaching interests are in musical participation, concert audiences and music education and in the qualitative research methods used to understand people’s uses of music in their everyday lives.

Sarah M. Price is audience researcher and member of the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC). As both an academic and a freelance audience researcher, Sarah has conducted audience research projects collaboratively with numerous arts organisations, including a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Her research interests are in the value of arts engagement, understanding audience behaviour and patterns of attendance, and the role of academic research within the arts industry.