High Culture Arts
Continuted from Arts and Marketing…
Butler highlights the disproportionate amount of funding received by ‘high culture’ arts, despite have the minority of customers compared to popular culture. A recent report showed that £400million in private investment goes to the top 50 organisations of which 74% are in London. In addition he shares similar arguments in terms of high culture being classed as noble and popular culture being referred to as vulgar.
The Butler article also raises an important issue of access, in terms of value delivery of the arts. This refers to the psychological and behavioural barriers that the public attach to the high culture arts, such as fear, intimidation, risk of financial wastage, lack of knowledge of proper etiquette or attire. Butler argues that the arts should make themselves more accessible to the wider public through popular brand sponsorships, familiar formats such as CDs, DVDs. However, this runs the risk of damaging the integrity of the artistic material and mongrelising the cultural appeal.
In my opinion the chapter extract by Fraser et al (2004) has the least to offer the arts marketing debate out of the primary studied literature. It is unspecific and vague in its objectives and does not meaningfully examine the key issues in arts marketing as its title suggests.
In parts the extract is hypocritical, for example despite opening with questions over the transferability of marketing concepts to arts marketing, the extract does not address any examples, issues or problems in this area in any great depth or detail.
Another issue with this extract, is the claim that the common theme of art forms is the service element where production is inseparable for consumption. However, this is clearly not the case with such art forms which the authors even define to include film and sculpture, which are clearly produced separately and then consumed by the audience at cinemas or galleries in isolation from the artist
In addition, the authors construction of argument often fails to expand and often goes on a tangent to the opening point. For example, the service element sentence as mentioned above, is then followed by a paragraph on competition and customer loyalty and involvement. My criticism is that some of the issues raised are not well explained and fail to get across any meaningful issues which could be useful to the field of arts marketing.
Generally the arts are much more intangible than other services. Shostack (1977) argued the notion of the services lying on a continuum of tangibility, with tangible services such as a haircut at one end of the spectrum and arts performances, where the customer simply experiences a performance of a play or orchestra which is highly subjective and intangible.
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