They swing between issuing press releases about change while reassuring insiders that none of the good stuff will be impacted. I can certainly think of organisations that fit this description: “Many institutions take a schizophrenic middle ground on relevance. Many organisations talk the talk whilst attempting to reassure themselves and the insiders that they won’t lose any of their privileges. Helping outsiders feel confident about entering your ‘room’ may unsettle the current insiders – it should certainly change the atmosphere. One of the key points of the book is that if you want to be more relevant to some people, you must be prepared to change what you do and for your centre of gravity to shift so you become less relevant to others. They can also be educational, challenging, empowering, political… but they must first be something people want.” Cultural experiences should be a pleasure. She goes on to deal with the old chestnut, “we shouldn’t be giving people what they want, our job is to give them what they need,” in a way that made something clearer to me than it had been before: “In my experience, the institutionally-articulated ‘needs’ of audiences often look suspiciously like the ‘wants’ of the professionals speaking… Let’s not sell short the power of giving people what they want. It’s about them – their values, their priorities.”
The key is that relevance is not about you: “It’s not about what you think people need to want or deserve. Nina Simon begins by skewering two common delusions seen weekly in the arts: firstly, that what we do is relevant to everyone and secondly, that we don’t have to work on that relevance as people will find our work due to its distinctiveness. It uses stories and micro-case studies to illustrate how switching the terms in an open and ongoing fashion leads to change, and to relevance.Īnyone working in an arts or cultural organisation who is not entirely satisfied will find something in The Art of RelevanceĪlong the way there are a good number of highly quotable lines and arguments. Using the images of rooms and keys and insiders and outsiders, the book is a sharp argument for mattering more to more people, not by assertion of your own intrinsic value but by making genuine connections. Relevance has the potential to give the other ‘R word’ a run for its money in the 2016 buzzword stakes, but we should not hold that against Nina or her argument. I came away with a copy of The Art of Relevance, her new book, the themes of which she set out in her talk.
Nina Simon, who is the Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and a leading museums thinker, was the punchiest keynote speaker at the recent AMA conference.
0 kommentar(er)
