Art With an Audience
January 24th.
I just finished talking with an italian Ph.D. student in spanish lilterature. He talked about the necessity for art that deals with human issues, for art to “do something.” I didn’t try to engage his point of view during the conversation, but it did bring me to an interesting question: to what extent can art change its audience? Is it possible to determine this? Can an artist really control the impact of his work? And if an artist wishes to change the ideas and beliefs of his audience, what technique works best? What are the thematic and aesthetic decisions that must be made?
It seems that most answers will oscillate between two possibilites. On the one hand, this artist can choose to make very popular art where “the message” is carried along, with an agreeable presentation of its subject matter and an aesthetic that is accessible and easy to interact with. The essence of this strategy would be that it approaches its audience from pleasure first rather than intellect. This work aims to be enjoyable as entertainment and hopes to communicate its message subtly rather than directly.
The other possibility is to make very confrontational work that puts the message at the head of all its artistics decisions. Thus both the presentation of its subject matter and its aesthetic choices are measured according to the message, and the result is often controversial and intense. This strategy approaches the audience through the intellect first and pleasure last. It often has a strong sense of morality that gives it a feeling of authority and confrontation. This work does not aim to be enjoyed as entertainment but rather wishes to communicate what it considers to be an urgent message.
The first strategy can quickly gain a broad fan base while it risks the loss of its message or substance to the sensuality of its popular attributes. Often enough the audience does not connect beyond the surface, missing entirely the real objectives of the artist. An example of this is Coppola’s first two Godfather films, wherein the second was made with the intention to clarify and push the moral message of the story–precisely because he felt that the audience had stayed at the surface of the first film, engaging with the wonderful story and technique and bypassing its moral content.
On the otherhand, the second strategy risks alienating most audience members while gaining in decency and self-respect because it refuses to compromise its subject matter for the sake of easier entertainment. Work of this nature often takes the most aesthetic risks because, since it measures its decisions on the criteria of the presumed importance of its message, the artist often feels that the more popular aesthetics are outdated or useless for its intentions.
And yet both cases have a high risk of preaching to the choir, of reducing the artisitic experience to whatever it was, aesthetically or ideologically, that excited the viewer before he met up with the work. In other words, that the artwork will not really communicate anything, let alone change anything, since it is giving the audience something that it is already comfortable with in the first place. Thus there is the possibility of a lack of real engagement into a critical thought process.
