The Artist + The Audience =

"Most people see art as something complicated, incomprehensible and unnecessary. Artists are often treated as "harmless fools". Why is this? Because art is always a new occurrence, it is original and it causes anxiety and therefore people are often ill-disposed towards it. A layman likes to say: "Even though I don`t know much about art I at least know what I like." But these aren`t actually their own preferences as their habits and the conditions they live in have made them like certain things and dislike others. We like the things we know and don`t trust the unknown. The past (which we know) seems better from the unpredictable future. We think of art in a similar way. Such thinking leads to the isolation of an artist who likes to penetrate new grounds of imagination." MORE

Who is The Artist's Audience

"Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? is a project about involving the other asparticipant in a set of protocols indicative of the effects, conditions and possibilities of contemporary art.  Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? starts with the offering of a painted steel object (125 x 80 x 18 cm) to be taken home by the participant (individual, group or collective), who will have a certain period of time (around one month) to realize an artistic experience with it. Although the physical object is the actual element which triggers the processes and starts up the experiences, it in fact brings to the foreground certain sets of invisible lines and diagrams concerning all kinds of relations and sensorial data, making visible networking and mediation structures. MORE

Audience Theory 

Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies.  With a specific focus on rhetoric, some, such as Walter Ong, have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the text is addressing. Others, such as Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor have said writers and speakers actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Some others like Ede and Lunsford try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is "fictionalized," as Ong would say, but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience."  MORE

Quotes

• Don't cater to the audience. Inspire the audience.    - Ken Danby
• The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.   - Joan Baez
• The artist... tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts.    - R.G. Collingwood 
• You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That's what you hope an artwork to be – a constantly living thing.    - Cornelia Parker
• If what you have to say is from your deepest feelings, you'll find an audience that responds.    - Irwin Greenberg
• When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.    - Mark Twain
• To have great poets, there must be great audiences.    - Walt Whitman