Adjust your view: developing multicultural audiences for the arts - a toolkit

Business cases and marketing strategies aside and without implementing a ridiculously political correctness, ideology also needs to be addressed. To not draw on or name post-colonial thought in this discussion as though that were too obscure to fathom or not compatible with talk of business, let alone the arts seems short-sighted. It needs to be acknowledged that anglo-saxon celtic is still the dominant voice in politics, commerce, industry, law and art, and in a sense the only way of speaking, not just the words but the ideas; the main point of reference for Australian cultural understanding. This now homogenised national identity somehow needs to 'retract' itself; to speak only for it's own cultural position - already a considerable challenge; to be just one more ethnicity in spite of it's obvious, existing, centralised power, because the main obstacle to multicultural expression is the entrenched 'speaking-as-though-for-everyone' of that one group that always already occurs in the multicultural debate. Once it's discovered that retracting influence to only speak from one's own culture will not dissolve the nation-state, but actually give greater potency to practitioners within that group, and allow the in-flow of 'strange' cultural ideas from 'outside', you won't have to spend excessive monies paying for other ethnic groups to pretend to excuse a position of arrogance as it presents in the content of Australian artwork.

Dear David Thank you for the comments, I hope to have illustrated some of what you alude to in context of the need to augment multicultural audiences. Fotis Kapetooulos

If you would like to read more on developing multicultural audiences you can read Fotis Kapetopoulos's earlier work - Who goes there? National multicultural arts audience case studies (2004), that examines three programs and the patterns emerging from audience surveys, focus groups, observation and key stake holder interviews between June 2002 and April 2003. Another publication on the Research Hub that covers multicultural audience development is Gillian Rogers (2003) Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Multicultural Audience Development Project. If you need guidence in your research contact a librarian at the Australia Council Library for assistance.