Guide to the Literature on Participation in the Arts

Abstract

In response to broad social, economic, and technological trends that have affected the arts environment over the past 15 years, arts organizations are increasingly reaching out to the communities they serve and encouraging individuals to participate in their programs. To successfully increase participation, they must identify and understand their potential audiences and develop programs and marketing approaches that will appeal to them. To assist in those efforts, this report presents an introduction to the best of the growing body of literature on participation-building. It is not an annotated bibliography that summarizes the contents of specific articles and books; rather, it analyzes the key contributions of the literature and provides lists of the most important books and articles on specific aspects of arts participation. The arts-participation literature can be classified into three categories: empirical literature, theoretical literature, and practitioner literature. The empirical literature consists primarily of information from national surveys, studies by local arts institutions, and demonstrative data on attendance patterns. These sources differ in the methods they employ, their geographical coverage, and the frequency with which they collect data. The resulting data likewise differ in their utility for research.