Consuming Culture, Measuring Access and Audience Development

Abstract

My title brings together two terms - measuring access and audience development - which, these days, might seem strange bedfellows. Rhetorics of access, even though they were more frequently honoured in the breach than in the observance, now seem increasingly like survivals from another age, the faint after-glow of a bygone policy era. Audience development, by contrast, is one of the brasher faces of the new policy environment, representing a challenge of compulsory self-­reliance for an arts and cultural sector that is being progressively weaned from the public purse. As such, the requirements of audience development are socially indiscriminate in ways that would seem to place them inherently at odds with the objectives of access policies. My purpose, however, is to suggest that access and audience development policies both can and should be made to work together. For the risk, if they are disconnected, is that access policies will prove ineffective while audience development policies will serve only to accentuate existing inequalities in the social patterns of access to, and use of, Australia's cultural and artistic resources.