Zwrot ku publiczności? Audience development jako próba uspołeczniania instytucji kultury

Audience development, or building and developing ongoing relationships with audiences of cultural events, is a quite new perspective in the Polish context. It assumes a permanent dialogue with one’s audience in order to study and diagnose its needs as well as to provide for a greater diversification and a deeper exploration of the very term ‘audience’ along with its interpretation. In Poland many examples may be found of different types of cultural and artistic activity, both institutional and less formal, which try to encourage people in urban and rural areas to be more engaged in community practices. Cultural institutions and places continue to evolve as their environment changes and new paradigms of ‘participation in culture’ are developed. In order to include new groups of viewers – non-professionals whose symbolic/cultural resources might prove insufficient to decode certain works of art – it is necessary to offer them a new language and a programme that will accommodate for new problems and topics. This article presents a critical discussion of ‘audience building/development’, while pointing to differences and similarities between this concept and the idea of neo-institutionalism.