Ben Cameron, Program Director, Arts, at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, acknowledges that contemporary technologies have disrupted existing economic models of our arts and cultural organizations.
“An organization or an artist who tries to attract the attention of single ticket buyer,” he explains, “now competes with between three and five thousand different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time.”
But what of it? We’re not going to pack up the theater, call it a millennia and say that arts institutions and practices no longer have a place in 21st century society.
“All of us,” he says, “are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications.”
So where to from here?
Cameron believes that disruption has bread an opportunity for artists and institutions to collaborate across disciplines, and in particular focus on bringing their skills and aesthetics to organizations advocating basic human rights across gender, race, religion, culture and sexuality.
In a bold statement he says the arts are in the midst of a technologically necessitated reformation — a word he explicitly links to the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago — and will only emerge if it embraces that status.
The video above is from Cameron’s February 2010 TED talk.
