Audience development, or building and developing ongoing relationships with audiences of cultural events, is a quite new perspective in the Polish context. It assumes a permanent dialogue with one’s audience in order to study and diagnose its needs as well as to provide for a greater diversification and a deeper exploration of the very term ‘audience’ along with its interpretation. In Poland many examples may be found of different types of cultural and artistic activity, both institutional and less formal, which try to encourage people in urban and rural areas to be more engaged in community practices. Cultural institutions and places continue to evolve as their environment changes and new paradigms of ‘participation in culture’ are developed. In order to include new groups of viewers – non-professionals whose symbolic/cultural resources might prove insufficient to decode certain works of art – it is necessary to offer them a new language and a programme that will accommodate for new problems and topics. This article presents a critical discussion of ‘audience building/development’, while pointing to differences and similarities between this concept and the idea of neo-institutionalism.
Bartek Lis and Jakub Walczyk discuss the phenomenon of omni-work and overproduction in the field of culture, taking into account the changes brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Omni-work, i.e. being constantly at work and involved in many parallel initiatives using mobile media, is a phenomenon common to various types of activity. On the other hand, overproduction in culture involves preparation of events, implementation of activities, and creation of programmes to an outsized extent. Although both concepts have existed for a long time, they have particularly intensified during the pandemic and acquired new, clear exemplifications. The authors explore them in a section affecting individuals and groups engaged in organisational, curatorial, artistic, and social activities in the area of culture. It is the specific nature of employment typical for culture professionals that particularly often evokes the terms discussed in this work. Among other things, by drawing on the analysis of identified data, the authors describe the notions of omni-work and overproduction and the context in which the new ‘pandemic’ reality affects the specificity of the field, reinforcing and exacerbating the long-standing problems, divisions, and disparities.
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