Mediating the Arts Threshold: The Australian Council of Youth

Abstract

The Australia Council's obligations require it to facilitate young people's engagement with the arts, a responsibility the Council has approached with a variety of procedures and concepts throughout its existence. However, many arts administrators believe that youth arts attendance is influenced and motivated by a number of factors ignored or misunderstood by the inarketing orientation of the Australia Council's audience developing programmes. Following research to establish a youth policy for the Council, Professor Tony Bennett called for audience development and access policies to be related to one another in long-term programs of culturally qualifymg new consumers. His concern was that the socially indiscriminate requirements of market demand audience development programs seemed to be inherently at odds with the objectives of access and equity policies constructed during the 1980s and 90s. This thesis records the Australia Council's development and application of its access and equity policy, the long evolution of its youth and the arts policy, and its audience development practices. It explores the effectiveness of the Council's efforts and concerns to provide young people with access to the arts and demonstrates that although various approaches have been employed with a degree of success, the influence of its client organisations, a stereotyped concept of young people as a youth culture, and poor research into the influences and motivations that generate an arts involvement, have limited this achievement. The theoretical centre of the thesis explores a diverse range of interrelated issues involving audience research, consumer culture, cultural capital, sub-cultures, motivation, arts marketing, identity creation, lifestyles, cultural values, and object codes. Tony Bennett's concept, that effective access policies and the development of new audiences both require culturally competent consumers, is examined to consider its basis and validity. This concept's key elements and the question it raises -what are access policies, how are new audiences developed, what is cultural resourcing, and how is a culturally effective consumer created -determined the thesis structure, content and theoretical core. It is argued that as the arts are a commodity, marketing is an expedient means of reaching a youth audience. However, it can only be effectively used for arts promotion by acknowledging that although adolescence has many common features, young people are not a homogenous demographic cohort, and the stereotyping youth by marketers as a single culture is misleading and unsound. Instead of a dependency on simplistic marketing, a more productive approach would recognise that cultural competency is a vital component of arts audience development and its provision should be part of education and be incorporated into the programs of arts organisations. The research element of the thesis is provided by a examination of the findings of recent research projects and the Youth Arts Consumption survey. A major survey of Australian cultural tastes, preferences and practices, the Australian Everyday Cultures study was unable to determine the motives and influences that act upon young people's cultural choices. Consequently, in 1998 the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy and the Australia Council obtained an Australian Research Council Award to undertake a study based on the Australian Everyday Culture into the currently prevailing and likely future trends of youth arts involvement and cultural consumption in Australia. This thesis, and its associated research project -the Youth Arts Consumption survey -is the outcome of that research study. The survey obtained new detailed information that provided a picture of young people's arts consumption, identified their leisure behaviour patterns and art involvement experiences, factors of influence and motive, and highly detailed demographic characteristics. This enabled correlation between young people's current arts consumption behaviowr, their past experiences, perceived barriers to access, and the influences and motivations that affect their choices and preferences. The thesis and the survey provide a fresh perspective of young people's relationship to the arts based on both theory and research that will enable the Australia Council's youth audience development policies and practices to encompass a variety of new approaches and address the actual factors that affect young people's art consumption behaviour.