This is the seventh article in a series about why the strategies that used to work don’t work the same way anymore — and what that means for every decision you’re making right now. If you missed the previous articles in the series, you can find them here.
If you’re an artistic director, the last few articles in this series may have made you nervous.
All this talk about starting from where audiences are. About understanding what people need. About the gap between what organizations send and what people receive. About seeing the humans in your seats instead of the audience in your head.
You’ve heard versions of this before. And every time, a quiet alarm goes off somewhere deep in your professional identity:
If I listen to audiences, I’ll only be able to produce what’s safe. What’s easy. What’s already been done. I’ll lose the thing that makes this work matter.
I want to speak directly to that fear, because it’s real. It comes from a place of genuine conviction. You became an artistic director because you believe art has the power to challenge, to provoke, to illuminate things people can’t see on their own. You believe your job is to lead — not to follow a focus group.
You’re right.
And nothing in what I’m about to say asks you to stop.
Your art doesn’t need protection from the people it was made for. It needs a bridge to reach them.
The Binary That Doesn’t Exist
Somewhere along the way, our sector accepted a false choice: You can serve your artistic vision, or you can serve your audience. You can program challenging, ambitious work, or you can give people what they want. You can lead with courage, or you can lead with accessibility.
As if these were opposites.
They’re not. They never were. But the belief that they are has quietly shaped how artistic directors think about audience engagement for decades. It shows up in the subtle resistance you feel when someone suggests that marketing should talk about how a piece will make people feel rather than why it’s important. It shows up in the worry that “accessible language” means “dumbed down.” It shows up in the assumption that caring about audience experience is somehow a retreat from artistic ambition.
This binary has cost us more than we realize. Not because it’s led to bad art — your programming instincts are probably excellent. But because it’s led to brilliant art that doesn’t find the people who need it most.
What We’re Actually Talking About
Let me make an important distinction.
There are two completely different activities happening in every arts organization. We’ve been conflating them, and that conflation is the source of almost all the tension between artistic vision and audience connection.
The first is art-making. What you create. What stories you tell. What music you program. What risks you take. What voices you amplify. What challenging, provocative, beautiful, uncomfortable work you bring into existence.
That’s yours. That’s sacred. Nobody is asking you to compromise it.
The second is meaning-making communication. How you help people understand what your artistic choices offer them. How you translate the experience you’ve created into language that helps someone — someone who doesn’t share your expertise, your context, your years of immersion in the art form — understand why this work might matter to their life.
These are not the same activity. And the audience-first philosophy we have been exploring is only about the second one.
An audience-first approach doesn’t touch your programming decisions. It doesn’t ask you to choose safer work. It doesn’t give audiences a vote on your season. It doesn’t dilute your ambition or soften your edge.
It asks one thing: Once you’ve made your bold artistic choice, are you willing to help people understand what that choice offers them?
Once you’ve made your bold artistic choice, are you willing to help people understand what that choice offers them?
The Same Work, Two Invitations
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
I recently attended a performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony — one of the most powerful works in the orchestral repertoire. Here’s how the marketing actually read:
“Experience Brahms’s magnum opus. His Fourth Symphony, a culmination of life’s work, performed with passion and precision. Immerse in the grandeur of his final symphonic masterpiece.”
The imagery: a painting of a solitary figure, seen from behind, gazing out over a foggy landscape.
Everything in this is true. It’s accurate. It honors the work. A music director would approve it without hesitation, because it reflects how someone who already loves Brahms thinks about Brahms.
But here’s what it communicates to someone who doesn’t already know this music: This is not for you.
“Magnum opus.” “Culmination of life’s work.” “Grandeur.” “Masterpiece.” These aren’t obscure words. But they’re all declarations of importance – and declarations of importance aren’t invitations. They tell you this music matters. They don’t help you imagine why it might matter to you.
The program notes went further — three paragraphs of musicology. Passacaglia structures. Contrapuntal variations. Rising sixths and falling thirds. Written for people who already speak the language.
Now hear me out: same work. Same symphony. Same artistic vision. Nothing changes about what happens on stage.
But what if the invitation sounded like this?
Brahms wrote his final symphony convinced he would never be as good as Beethoven. That feeling — of measuring yourself against greatness and coming up short, of wondering whether what you create will ever be enough — runs through every note of this work. It’s impostor syndrome set to music. And it’s one of the most emotionally devastating pieces ever written, because Brahms took that very human struggle and turned it into something that, 140 years later, still takes your breath away.
You don’t need to know anything about classical music to feel what this symphony does. You just need to have ever doubted yourself — and wondered whether that doubt might be fuel for something extraordinary.
Same work. Same artistic vision. Same notes played by the same musicians in the same hall.
The first framing tells you Brahms is important. The second tells you Brahms was human just like you — and you don’t need a doctorate in musicology to feel what he felt.
Neither version changed the art. The difference is entirely in the framing — in whether we talked about the work the way we experience it as insiders, or the way a human being might experience it as a person carrying their own story into the concert hall.
The Fear Behind the Resistance
So why does this feel threatening?
Because for many artistic directors, the language is the art. The way you talk about the work — its craft, its lineage, its cultural significance, its place in the canon — feels inseparable from the work itself. Simplifying that language feels like simplifying the art. Translating it feels like betraying it.
I understand this. And I want to honor it, because it comes from a deep and genuine commitment to artistic integrity.
But I want to gently challenge one assumption embedded in it: the belief that the way you experience the work is the only legitimate way to experience it.
You hear Brahms’s Fourth and you hear the passacaglia structure, the contrapuntal mastery, the dialogue with Beethoven’s legacy. That’s beautiful. That’s the gift your expertise gives you.
But someone else hears Brahms’s Fourth and feels, without any technical vocabulary at all, a wave of something they can’t name — melancholy and defiance and beauty tangled together — and they leave the concert hall different than when they walked in.
Both experiences are real. Both are valid. Both are what the art was made to do.
And here’s the thing we don’t say often enough: art requires an audience to fulfill its purpose. Without someone in the seat — someone receiving, interpreting, being changed — even the most brilliant performance is a rehearsal. It’s art as an adjective. Beautiful, important, significant. But static.
Art requires an audience to fulfill its purpose.
The audience is what turns art into a verb. Not because they validate it or approve it, but because meaning-making is a cycle that isn’t complete until someone experiences what you’ve created. And what they experience — which will never be exactly what you intended, because that’s how art works — is what brings your mission statement to life. It’s what turns “we serve our community through excellent art” from words on a wall into something real.
Every mission statement in our sector makes a promise about impact. About transformation. About community. About changing lives through art.
You can’t keep that promise in an empty room.
So when someone suggests you think about audience experience, they’re not asking you to compromise your vision. They’re asking you to complete it.
The question is: which experience does your marketing invite people into?
If the answer is only the insider experience — only the expert’s frame — then you’re not protecting your art. You’re limiting who gets to be transformed by it.
Remember the Gap
In an earlier article in this series, we noticed something: there’s a persistent space between what arts organizations send and what people receive. Beautiful, sophisticated marketing that doesn’t land. Campaigns everyone in the building is proud of that don’t move the needle.
Now we can see one of the reasons why.
It’s not because the marketing director isn’t talented. It’s not because the budget is too small (but it probably is). It’s often because the artistic perspective — the insider’s way of experiencing and describing the work — has become the default language for talking about it. Not through any deliberate gatekeeping, but because everyone in the approval process shares the same expertise. And when everyone in the room has forgotten what it’s like to not know what they know, the language naturally drifts toward the insider’s frame.
The marketing director drafts something that speaks to how people will feel. The approval process pushes it back toward how the work is significant. The final version satisfies every insider in the room. And the audience scrolls past.
This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s an expertise problem. We’ve spent so long inside our art forms that we’ve forgotten how much we know — and how little of that knowledge our audiences share. The curse of expertise isn’t that we know too much. It’s that we can no longer imagine not knowing it.
Your marketing director needs more than your tolerance to translate your artistic vision into human invitation. They need your active encouragement to describe the same work you love in language that helps someone who doesn’t share your expertise understand what it might offer their life.
That translation doesn’t diminish your vision. It fulfills it.
Because what is artistic vision for, if not to reach people?
Because what is artistic vision for, if not to reach people?
The Real Question
Here’s what it comes down to.
Do you want audiences to experience your artistic vision? Or do you want to protect your vision from audiences?
Because you can’t do both.
If you protect it — if you wrap it in insider language and expert frameworks and credentials that signal importance to people who already agree — then yes, your artistic integrity will be perfectly preserved. In a room that gets emptier every year.
But if you want people to actually be changed by the work you’ve chosen — if you want the challenging piece to challenge someone, the provocative work to provoke someone, the beautiful thing to take someone’s breath away — then you need to let them in.
Not into the programming decisions. Not into the season selection. Not into the artistic process.
Into the experience of what you’ve created.
And that starts with communication that meets them where they are instead of where you wish they were.
What Becomes Possible
When you stop treating artistic vision and audience connection as opposites, something remarkable happens.
The challenging work finds more people. Not because you’ve softened it, but because you’ve helped people understand why it’s worth the risk. The audience that shows up is more engaged, not less — because they came knowing this experience was meant for them, not despite them.
The marketing director stops fighting the approval process and starts collaborating with you on translation — turning your artistic insight into audience invitation. The gap between what gets sent and what gets received starts to close. Not because you’ve compromised, but because you’ve communicated.
And the fear that started this article — if I listen to audiences, I’ll only be able to produce what’s safe — reveals itself for what it always was: a false choice. A binary that never existed. A wall you built to protect something that was never actually under threat.
Your art doesn’t need protection from the people it was made for.
It needs a bridge to reach them.
What resonated as you read this? If you’re an artistic director, I’d especially love to hear: Has this tension between vision and connection shown up in your work? How have you navigated it? Comment below or send me a message — I reply to every note I receive.
Next in this series: When artistic vision and audience connection aren’t at odds, what becomes possible?
Artistic vision and audience connection only feel like opposites when leadership hasn’t aligned around how they fit together. The free Audience First Organizational Alignment Assessment asks directly whether your artistic leadership sees audience needs and artistic vision as complementary, along with four other dimensions of readiness. It takes about 10 minutes, and your personalized report arrives in your inbox as soon as you finish.
Leave a Reply