Finding Your Niche and Banding Together (Mass Culture Ain’t So Tough)
Via CEOs for Cities, a few great posts by Douglas McLennan on the subject of mass culture.
We in the arts (and I’m talking about smaller organizations and individual artists, not movie stars) have a schizoid relationship towards mainstream mass media. On the one hand, we are entirely comfortable flaunting our elitist disdain for lowbrow commercial fare. (We have MFAs! We’re interested in ART, not your filthy money!) At the same time, though, most of us harbor a barely concealed inferiority complex. Deep down we know that the public - our community - craves American Idol and news about Brangelina more than our experimental masterpieces. God knows they’re more willing to pay for it…
Thankfully, McLennan blows up the whole high art / low art dichotomy, first with some eye-opening observations:
Magazine Readership
People (perhaps the ultimate mass culture publication)
3.8 million subscribers, 1.3% of our nation’s population
The New Yorker (elitist fare if ever there was)
1.1 million subscribers, 0.4% of our nation’s population
Sure, there’s a difference there, but People hardly approaches the ubiquity implied by the notion of mass media, and The New Yorker has a pretty respectable base for something that’s allegedly so niche.
Radio Listenership
Rush Limbaugh: 14 million
NPR’s Morning Edition: 13.5 million
Basically identical, and again, neither is remotely pervasive given the size of the potential audience.
McLennan:
[I]f a definition of success of mass culture is the ability to pull audience, then maybe we need to reassess where the true mass culture is when video game sales beat movie sales, public radio beats the socks off the commercial version, and attendance at arts events outstrips the audience for professional sports.
There are a couple of very important points here. First is that our cultural consumption is, and maybe always has been, pretty darn fragmented. People isn’t successful because it appeals to the lowest common denominator. It’s successful because it has done an excellent job at finding and catering to a particular niche audience. What a liberating idea! The lesson is that it’s time to stop worrying about some bogus struggle between creative integrity and populist pandering. It’s a destructive red herring and always has been. Instead, find the audience that your work speaks to and nurture a sincere relationship with the folks in that niche.
Second is that, although individual arts producers’ audiences tend to be quite meager, collectively we’re hugely popular. So why do we do such a crappy job at leveraging that popularity? Why are artists marginalized as elitists while professional baseball players are lauded as American heros, when we’re outperforming them at the box office? This is a much bigger topic for another time, but suffice it to say it has a lot to do with collaboration (or lack thereof), destructive territorialism, and parochial attitudes about industry advocacy. We’ve got to start working together, folks.
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