Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life

A century ago, the invention of recorded sound, radio and moving pictures transformed art and entertainment.  Americans were no longer exposed to art and culture primarily through local venues, live performances, and amateur artists and entertainers.  Instead, national markets arose along with new professional communities of artists.  The star system was born, access to art and culture expanded by leaps and bounds, and emerging divisions between elite and popular culture became more pronounced.

Today, the arts in America face similar transformative changes.  New technologies, new systems of distribution, declining prices, increasing leisure, and a rising “creative class” foretell a potential cultural renaissance where citizens actively navigate an unlimited bandwidth of new and diverse cultural possibilities.  But how exactly will this transformation play out?  Who is most likely to benefit?

Engaging Art forges a new framework for understanding these momentous changes in America’s cultural life.  The book challenges old ways of thinking, raises probing questions and uncovers deep and important currents in how Americans engage with arts and culture, sounding a clarion call for new research and thinking about the arts in this country.

Contributing authors demonstrate that notions of high culture are changing; that the link between elite art and status is becoming more tenuous; that more American’s engage with art and culture through church and other religious institutions than through traditional concert and museum venues; that cultural participation may be less about individual enrichment and personal enlightenment and more about family, friends and community; that quiet, passive and polite audiences are giving rise to interactive, demanding and engaged consumers; that seemingly limitless variety and abundant cultural choice does not always lead to more satisfied consumers; and that questions about future trends in cultural participation depend less on whether or not young people are listening to classical music, and more on how kids are forging entirely new creative forms using changing technologies.

The book’s editors include Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven Tepper, a prominent cultural policy scholar and sociologist.  Together, they bridge the academy and the world of public policy, sociology and vernacular culture, research and practice.  The books contributors include such noted scholars as Robert Wuthnow and Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University; Richard Peterson and Dan Cornfield, Vanderbilt University; J. Mark Schuster and Henry Jenkins from M.I.T.; and Barry Schwartz from Swarthmore College.

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Engaging Art:  A Public Conversation, June 14-20, 2007